Where may the Lindsey Graham-Richard Blumenthal resolution in the U.S. Senate ‘on Russian Nuclear Threats’ lead us?

Answer: to a pre-emptive Russian Strategic Nuclear attack on the Continental United States

Once my televised interviews are posted by the hosts on their websites and Twitter accounts, I often take a look at the Comments from viewers to better understand the audience and its mood.  After my first appearance on one of India’s largest circulation English-speaking news channels with global reach, I was amused to see the remark: “hey, the old guy isn’t saying what they expected him to say!”  A bit further down the Comments column was the remark that the viewer was delighted to see an unusual point of view presented on the channel.  Perhaps the general management also reads the Comments, because I have been invited back on their various programs repeatedly since then.

Regrettably, not every “old guy” in public view says what is not expected of him. A case in point is the very hawkish and reckless position aired by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) at their news conference a few days ago when they explained the Resolution they have introduced in the Upper House on a bipartisan basis.

I say that their position was expected of them because as longstanding pillars of the Neoconservative majority in Congress they advocate a foreign policy that is ‘as American as apple pie.’ That is to say it is based entirely and exclusively on domestic political considerations.. They say in the Resolution that they want the warning to reach the ears of Putin and his military generals, but they are really focused on rallying their peers on Capitol Hill for further military aid to Ukraine, meaning further billions to the military industrial complex that is building or replacing that hardware.

Their message will, of course, be reported to Putin. Indeed it is already the subject of the day on Russian state television and social media. But the good Senators misjudge entirely what the Russian reaction will be, and they misjudge because they do not listen to Russian opinions and military doctrine that has been revised and clarified over the past year as the war evolved. Nor do they begin to understand the strength of Russian military forces at both conventional and nuclear arms, the strength of the Russian economy and the relevance of Russia’s being aligned with more than half of the world’s population and with producers enjoying a greater share of global GDP than the USA and its G7 allies today.

Unfortunately virtual reality, which is the space in which Blumenthal and Graham apparently reside, is not just a marketing gimmick of Zuckerberg and his peers in the entertainment industry. Virtual reality is the only reality that the American political Establishment knows. External, objective reality simply does not exist for these people. All the more so that we are living in a post-truth world ushered in by Donald Trump.

I take a special interest in the ‘old guy’ Richard Blumenthal, because he was a classmate of mine in Harvard ’67, one of at least four classmates who rose high in their respective professional fields of government or news media and have, over the course of several decades, done their absolute best to bring the United States into a kinetic war with Russia.

About my Gang of Four classmates I will write below, but now let us look at the pending Resolution in the Senate.

 The Resolution states how the United States should respond to Russia’s possible use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Ukrainian war theater plus one other nuclear scenario. Of course, the chance of the Russians resorting to tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine is nil, given they are doing splendidly at present batting away the Ukrainian counter-offensive with conventional weapons and are enjoying a 10:1 kill ratio while destroying the latest Western tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery units almost as quickly as they are delivered to Ukraine by the NATO countries.  The authors of the Resolution surely know this.  Talk about tactical nuclear weapons is merely the cover for the real thrust of the Resolution: to make an awaited Russian attack on the Zaporozhie nuclear power plant a casus belli.

Implementation of any of these dastardly acts by the Russians would spread nuclear clouds into neighboring NATO nations and still further afield. Under the terms of the Resolution they could thereby trigger implementation of the famous Article 5 of the North Atlantic Alliance treaty.

The problem with the last named red line is that an attack on the nuclear plant is now being planned and may be implemented in the coming days by the Kiev regime under the “false flag” scenario that the United States and its vassals have perfected over the years in operations ranging from the alleged chemical attacks on civilian populations blamed on Bashar al Assad in Syria, to the MH-17 downing over Ukraine and on to the staged Bucha massacre in Ukraine that Russia is said to have perpetrated. Since Graham was in Kiev colluding with Zelensky and his circle of war criminals a couple of weeks ago, there is good reason to suppose that he is a co-author of the plan to attack the nuclear power station.

Russian social media and even Russian state television news today speak of a Ukrainian strike on the power station at any time from tonight, 5^th July through 9^th July. The cut-off date would leave sufficient time to draft and pre-approve among NATO members their collective response to the alleged Russian crime for an official vote at the gathering on the 12^th.  

Russian social networks tell us that the Ukrainians will use one or more Soviet vintage Tochka-V missiles to hit the power plant. We saw them in action at the very start of the Ukraine war when the Kiev forces struck downtown Donetsk with such missiles.  It is doubtful that a normally configured Tochka missile would have the force to seriously damage the reactors. But it is assumed that the missiles will be fitted with warheads containing radioactive spent fuel, of which there is a vast quantity available in Ukraine.  In that case, a missile striking the reinforced concrete shell covering the reactors would upon explosion release radioactive dust suitable for the purposes of a false flag operation against Russia.

The news conference of Blumenthal and Graham was rich in material incriminating them both as war mongers. Here is a brief sampling from the C-Span printed record:

Quote

I applaud President Biden for putting on the table that the threat of Putin using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine is real and our message is to those around Putin that if you do this, if you follow his order, if he ever gives it, you can expect a massive response from NATO and you will be at war with NATO.

I put everybody in this body and this Congress on notice that the threat of use of a nuclear device by Russia is real and the best way to deter it is to give them clarity…..if they do that, they will be in a war with NATO.

It’s based on fact and science and it is meant to send a message to Vladimir Putin and even more directly to his military, they will be destroyed, they will be eviscerated if they use tactical nuclear weapons or if they destroy a nuclear plant in a way that threatens surrounding NATO nations.

{Putin] has committed industrial level war crimes thinking he will eventually get away with it. His goal now is to wear the west out. Slow down the counter offensive. Get people in Washington and other capitals of the world to just break and offer and offer him some face saving deal…If he gets away with this, Putin, there goes Taiwan.

If you think Putin will stop in Ukraine, you’re not listening to what he’s saying. This is a moment in world history to stop one of the most aggressive, brutal people on the planet, send a signal to China.

Unquote

The total indifference of these Senators to the situation on the ground in Ukraine, not to mention to the real persona and public speaking record of Vladimir Putin speaks for itself. Their understanding of the Russian leader is at the level of juvenile caricature, or to put it in terms all too familiar to Americans – at the level of one of the last dunces in the White House, George W. Bush, who once upon a time sought to punish Vladimir Vladimirovich by disinviting him to a Fourth of July hotdog party on the White House lawn. Now the stakes for this kind of kindergarten level statecraft have risen to the point of declaring war on Russia for crimes that our vassal in Kiev may commit. 

The latest thinking of the Russian leadership on the use of nuclear weapons as set out in its public pronouncements is that a pre-emptive strike can be envisioned if there is an imminent threat of nuclear attack from abroad.  This is not about some tactical weapons being used against troop concentrations in Ukraine, or even about their being used against the Ramstein air force base in Germany should it be the starting point of F-16s sent against Russian forces in Ukraine.  No, it is about striking the puppet master behind the entire show, namely Washington and the Continental USA if anything like the Blumenthal-Graham Resolution is passed and put into action following the false flag operation described above.

Heaven help us all!

                                                                        *****

As I noted at the outset, Richard Blumenthal has long been a voice against coexistence with Russia on Capitol Hill. He exemplifies how the Neocon ideology that was spawned by disaffected Leftists in the 1970s and ‘80s and won over Republican adherents like Senator John McCain, aided and abetted by one of the movement’s theoreticians, Robert Kagan, eventually took hold in the Democratic Party, including its entire Progressive wing.

Other portraits from my Harvard Class of 1967 which hang in my gallery of rogues and would-be war criminals are those of Richard Morningstar, Tom Ridge and Serge Schmemann.

Morningstar made his move into government during the Clinton Administration thanks to his big financial contributions to the party. He was given important assignments by Madeleine Albright to sabotage the Russian network of active and planned gas and oil pipelines to Europe with the objective of destroying the Russian economy. It was a close race, but the prize in those contests went to the better man, Vladimir Putin, and Morningstar’s efforts against the South Stream and other projects uniformly failed. He ended his public career as ambassador to one of the countries in which he was active from the beginning, Azerbaijan.

Tom Ridge moved from state level politics to the federal level after George W. Bush appointed him as the country’s first Secretary of Homeland Security. In that capacity, Ridge was responsible for implementing the Freedom Act which was part and parcel of the suppression of all civil liberties in the USA for purposes of furthering the War on Terror. In this way, Ridge had personal responsibility for choking off free speech and free thinking in the USA, thereby preparing the country for the brain dead present half of the population that supports Biden and the war. 

Finally, I mention once again classmate Serge Schmemann, member of the editorial board of the New York Times, who over the course of decades in various journalistic positions has been venomously anti-Putin and essentially anti-Russian.

And who says that ‘old guys’ from Harvard do not count in American politics?

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023