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    Eurasian Tinderbox: The U.S. Buildup Against Russia and China
    Eurasian Tinderbox: The U.S. Buildup Against Russia and China
    Eurasian Tinderbox: The U.S. Buildup Against Russia and China
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    Eurasian Tinderbox: The U.S. Buildup Against Russia and China

    By Jimmy Colwill

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    On August 6 1945, the United States dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Japan. The subsequent Cold War between the West and Soviet Russia witnessed the most dangerous flashpoints in human history. Today, as NATO carries out the biggest military buildup on Russia's borders since Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941, the spectre of an accidental nuclear war has returned with a vengeance. On the other side of the Atlantic, the U.S. conducts a parallel encirclement strategy against China, whose economic and militarise rise marks the end of American dominance in the Asia-Pacific.

    Author Jimmy Colwill, producer of 'Flashpoints' (2017), journeys through the genesis of the nuclear age and the string of dangerous flashpoints since 1945, culminating in today's Eurasian tinderbox.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJimmy Colwill
    Release dateOct 27, 2017
    ISBN9781386624431
    Eurasian Tinderbox: The U.S. Buildup Against Russia and China

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      Eurasian Tinderbox - Jimmy Colwill

      Introduction

      In 1914, Europe was plunged into four years of industrialised carnage, the First World War, killing 15 million people and wounding a further 21 million. The world’s first such conflict, it marked a turning in the history of human warfare[1]. The next seventy five years witnessed a Second World War in which 50 million died, followed by a nuclear arms race in which doomsday was only narrowly averted. Since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, NATO has carried out the biggest military build-up on Russia’s borders since Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which led to the deaths of 27 million people. The NATO buildup has generated at least 66 near-miss incidents with Russian forces[2]. On the other side of the Atlantic, the US military is encircling China.

      The Greek historian Thucydides famously said: It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable. By this, he meant the challenge posed to the established power (Sparta) by a new competitor (Athens). In the past 500 years, ‘Thucydides’ Trap’ has had a 75% success rate in causing war[3]. Thus, argues Graham Allison[4]:

      ...when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, the resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule, not the exception...More important than the sparks that lead to war, Thucydides teaches us, are the structural factors that lay its foundations: conditions in which otherwise manageable events can escalate with unforeseeable severity and produce unimaginable consequences.

      The dangers this time round are incalculable. In quantitative terms, the combined nuclear arsenals of America and Russia are enough to wipe out life on earth many times over. Just one nuclear exchange between the US and China would mean a global famine that would wipe out a majority of the human race[5]. The willingness of great power/s to risk such a catastrophe is rooted in its/their sense of crisis and desperation. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has aggressively sought to reverse its imperial decline and sustain its status as the preeminent superpower. But with the economic crisis since 2008, US imperialism is forced to confront head-on the key obstacles to its geo-dominance[6]. Geopolitical analyst Eric Draitser observes[7]:

      ...Russia hopes to build, piecemeal if necessary, a common Eurasian economic sphere that will ultimately rival the US and Europe in terms of economic influence. However, the ultimate goal of this sort of cooperation goes far beyond economic power. Rather, Russia is the key facilitator of a series of multilateral arrangements created in the last fifteen years that Putin (and much of the world) hopes will ultimately move the world towards a multipolar global order.

      ...From energy reserves to the all important pipeline infrastructure, the new arrangement will, over time, have a greater impact on energy exports and consumption both in Europe and Asia as China looks to further secure its energy future...Essentially then, the EEU should be understood as yet another blow to US hegemony in Asia and the former Soviet space.

      In addition to the BRICS alliance and Eurasian Union, Russian President Vladimir Putin has founded the Development Bank, an appealing alternative to the austerity-demanding IMF and World Bank, whose policies have exacerbated poverty in the Third World and enabled the corporate pillage of its peoples’ lands and resources[8]. Crucially for Washington, Iran, Russia and China (the latter pair in a joint signing) are poised to drop the dollar, just as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi did before being toppled in 2003 and 2011[9]. Economic sanctions against Russia since her ‘annexation of Crimea’, meanwhile, have merely served to consolidate the alliance between these three nations, as the axis of economic power shifts rapidly from the West to Asia.

      How did we reach this stage, where the threat of nuclear war is once again a real possibility? This book attempts to answer that question, beginning with the origins of the nuclear age and the key flashpoints that characterised the Cold War.

      Chapter 1: The Destroyer of Worlds

      The lightning beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. it was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined...

      This was how the US War Department described the first atomic bomb test at 5:30am, July 16 1945. The desert site from which it was launched, near Alamogordo, New Mexico (United States), was known to locals as Jornada del Muetro, ‘journey of the dead man’[1]. One of the physicists, Ralph Smith, observed the blast from Compania Hill. The following is his testimony as preserved in the Public Affairs Office of the White Sands Missile Range:

      It turned yellow, then red, and then beautiful purple. At first it had a translucent character but shortly turned to a tined or colored white smoke appearance. The ball of fire seemed to rise in something of toadstool effect. Later the column proceeded as a cylinder of white smoke; it seemed to move ponderously. A hole was punched through the clouds but two fog rings appeared well above the white smoke column. There was a spontaneous cheer from the observers. Dr Von Neumann said, that was at least 5000 tons and probably a lot more.

      In a television interview in 1965, the leading scientist Robert Oppenheimer gave a sombre recollection of that day[1]:

      We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed. Few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. I guess we all felt that, one way or another.

      Perhaps Oppenheimer was reflecting on the geopolitical consequences of the atomic bomb, including the then relatively recent Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 which, as we shall later see, brought the world to what John F Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger later described, in his forward to the 1999 reissue of Robert Kennedy’s memoir Thirteen Days, as the most dangerous moment in human history. In 1938, German physicist Otto Hahn successfully split the uranium atom, prompting fears among European scientists had Hitler was on the road to building an atomic bomb. Two scientists, Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein, addressed their concerns to US

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