Historic Earthquakes
Near New York City, New York
1884 08 10 19:07 UTC
Magnitude 5.5The History Of New York Earthquakes: Before The Sixth Seal (Rev 6:12)
Intensity VII
USGS.gov
This severe earthquake affected an area roughly extending along the Atlantic Coast from southern Maine to central Virginia and westward to Cleveland, Ohio. Chimneys were knocked down and walls were cracked in several States, including Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Many towns from Hartford, Connecticut, to West Chester,Pennsylvania.
Property damage was severe at Amityville and Jamaica, New York, where several chimneys were “overturned” and large cracks formed in walls. Two chimneys were thrown down and bricks were shaken from other chimneys at Stratford (Fairfield County), Conn.; water in the Housatonic River was agitated violently. At Bloomfield, N.J., and Chester, Pa., several chimneys were downed and crockery was broken. Chimneys also were damaged at Mount Vernon, N.Y., and Allentown, Easton, and Philadelphia, Pa. Three shocks occurred, the second of which was most violent. This earthquake also was reported felt in Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Several slight aftershocks were reported on August 11.
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Day: June 23, 2024
Strike kills 22 in tent camp in the Outer Court: Revelation 11
Strike kills 22 in tent camp near ICRC office in Gaza, aid group says
The strike in Mawasi, north of Rafah, was “dangerously close to humanitarian structures” and damaged the ICRC’s office, the humanitarian group said.
Victoria BissetJune 22, 2024 at 9:12 a.m. EDT
At least 22 people were killed and 45 injured after “heavy-calibre projectiles landed within metres” of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s office in the Gaza Strip, the humanitarian group said.
The strike on Friday afternoon in Mawasi, north of Rafah, “damaged the structure of the ICRC office, which is surrounded by hundreds of displaced civilians living in tents, including many of our Palestinian colleagues,” the organization wrote in a statement Friday. “Firing so dangerously close to humanitarian structures puts the lives of civilians and Red Cross staff at risk.”
It said the “incident caused a mass casualty influx at the nearby Red Cross Field Hospital,” which received 22 bodies and 45 injured people, with “reports of additional casualties.”
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Gaza’s Health Ministry said 25 people were killed and 50 wounded in the attack, and accused “the Israeli occupation targeting the tents of displaced civilians” in Mawasi.
In a statement to The Washington Post on Saturday, the Israeli military said that an initial inquiry suggested there was “no indication that a strike was carried out by the IDF in the Humanitarian Area in Al-Mawasi,” adding that the incident is under review.
Separately on Friday, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres pleaded for “reason and rationality” as he expressed his “profound concerns” over the risk of an all-out war between Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Israel.
Addressing reporters Friday, Guterres said there had been an escalation of exchanges of fire and in “bellicose rhetoric from both sides, as if an all-out war was imminent.”
“One rash move, one miscalculation, could trigger a catastrophe that goes far beyond the border, and frankly, beyond imagination,” he said. “Let’s be clear: The people of the region and the people of the world cannot afford Lebanon to become another Gaza.”
Earlier this week, the Israeli military said it had “approved and validated” operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon, as Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz warned on social media that “in an all-out war, Hezbollah will be destroyed and Lebanon will be severely hit.” On the same day, Hezbollah, an Iranian-allied military force and Lebanon’s strongest political party, said it had new weapons and intelligence capabilities that could be used in case of a full-scale war.
The two sides have been exchanging fire since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel — the worst fighting between the two foes since a deadly, month-long war in 2006.
Yemen’s Houthi fighters are threatening some of the world’s most vital shipping routes despite months of U.S.-led airstrikes, as The Post reports. The once ragtag rebels are drawing from an arsenal of increasingly advanced weapons to attack vessels in and around the Red Sea, sinking one ship and setting another ablaze just this month.
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Around 39,000 Palestinian students are unable to take their final high school exams, which were to begin on Saturday, due to the war in Gaza, Palestinian state news agency WAFA reported. According to humanitarian groups, some 625,000 students have been out of school since the war began in October.
An Israeli citizen was shot dead in the town of Qalqilya on Saturday, according to the Israel Defense Forces. The IDF said it was operating in the town in the occupied West Bank after the killing, which Israeli media report was the second killing of an Israeli in the town in recent days.
Cuba announced that it intends to join South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice, according to a statement from its Foreign Ministry released Friday. Earlier this month, Spain became the first European country to ask to join the case; other countries including Mexico, Colombia, Nicaragua, Libya have requested to join, according to the Associated Press.
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A senior State Department official and skeptic of the Biden administration’s “bear hug” approach to the government of Israel resigned this week in a setback for U.S. diplomats pushing for a sharper break with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition, said three people familiar with the matter.
At least 37,551 people have been killed and 85,911 injured in Gaza since the war started,according to the Gaza Health Ministry. It does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, including more than 300 soldiers, and it says 312 soldiers have been killed since the launch of its military operations in Gaza
Drones knock out two substations near Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station: Jeremiah 12
Ukrainian drones knock out two substations near Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, Russia-installed officials say
June 22, 20243:20 AM MDTUpdated 6 hours ago
June 21 (Reuters) – Russian-installed officials said on Friday that Ukrainian drone attacks had put out of action two electricity substations in Enerhodar, the town serving the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station and cut power to most of its residents.
But an official at the occupied Zaporizhzhia station, Europe’s largest nuclear plant with six reactors, said it was unaffected by the military action.
On Saturday morning, the Russian management of the station said on their official Telegram channel that some “infrastructure facilities”, including the transport department and print shop, experienced disruptions following the attacks.
They said that nuclear safety measures remain fully operational.
Russian troops seized the plant in the early days of the February 2022 invasion and Moscow and Kyiv have since routinely accused each other of endangering safety around it. It produces no electricity at the moment.
Eduard Senovoz, the top official in Enerhodar, wrote on Telegram that the latest attack had damaged the second of two substations supplying the town. The other substation was destroyed on Wednesday, he wrote.
Ukrainian officials have made no comment on the incidents and Reuters could not independently confirm the reports.
Russian news agencies quoted Yevgeny Yashin, director of communications at the Zaporizhzhia station, as saying the latest attack had no effect on the nuclear plant. And he said the substation could be repaired.
“Specialists have gone out to the site to assess the damage,” Yashin told RIA news agency. “There is a chance to restore the damaged transformer but it will take time.”
Russia launched mass attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure in the first winter of the conflict and resumed a long series of attacks in March.
Kyiv says the renewed attacks have knocked out half of Ukraine’s energy generating capacity and forced blackouts.
Ukraine has stepped up its use of drones this year to attack Russian oil facilities. Ukrainian drones struck four Russian oil refineries as well as radar stations and other military targets in Russia in the early hours of Friday, Kyiv’s military said.
Reporting by Ron Popeski; editing by Diane Craft
Hamas Is Winning: Revelation 11
Why Israel’s Failing Strategy Makes Its Enemy Stronger
By Robert A. Pape
June 21, 2024
Nine months of Israeli air and ground combat operations in Gaza have not defeated Hamas, nor is Israel close to vanquishing the terrorist group. To the contrary, according to the measures that matter, Hamas is stronger today than it was on October 7.
Since Hamas’s horrific attack last October, Israel has invaded northern and southern Gaza with approximately 40,000 combat troops, forcibly displaced 80 percent of the population, killed over 37,000 people, dropped at least 70,000 tons of bombs on the territory (surpassing the combined weight of bombs dropped on London, Dresden, and Hamburg in all of World War II), destroyed or damaged over half of all buildings in Gaza, and limited the territory’s access to water, food, and electricity, leaving the entire population on the brink of famine.
Although many observers have highlighted the immorality of Israel’s conduct, Israeli leaders have consistently claimed that the goal of defeating Hamas and weakening its ability to launch new attacks against Israeli civilians must take precedence over any concerns about Palestinian lives. The punishment of the population of Gaza must be accepted as necessary to destroy the power of Hamas.
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But thanks to Israel’s assault, Hamas’s power is actually growing. Just as the Viet Cong grew stronger during the massive “search and destroy” operations that ravaged much of South Vietnam in 1966 and 1967 when the United States poured troops into the country in an ultimately futile bid to turn the war in its favor, Hamas remains intractable and has evolved into a tenacious and deadly guerrilla force in Gaza—with lethal operations restarting in the northern regions that were supposedly cleared by Israel only a few months ago.
The central flaw in Israel’s strategy is not a failure of tactics or the imposition of constraints on military force—just as the failure of the United States’ military strategy in Vietnam had little to do with the technical proficiency of its troops or political and moral limits on the uses of military power. Rather, the overarching failure has been a gross misunderstanding of the sources of Hamas’s power. To its great detriment, Israel has failed to realize that the carnage and devastation it has unleashed in Gaza has only made its enemy stronger.
THE BODY COUNT FALLACY
For months, governments and analysts have fixated on the number of Hamas fighters killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as if this statistic were the most important measure of the success of Israel’s campaign against the group. To be sure, many Hamas fighters have been killed. Israel says 14,000 of the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 fighters Hamas had before the war are now dead, while Hamas insists it has lost only 6,000 to 8,000 fighters. U.S. intelligence sources indicate the real number of Hamas dead is around 10,000.
A focus on these numbers, however, makes it hard to truly assess Hamas’s power. Despite its losses, Hamas remains in de facto control of large swaths of Gaza, including those areas where the territory’s civilians are now concentrated. The group still enjoys tremendous support from Gazans, allowing militants to seize humanitarian supplies almost at will and easily return to areas previously “cleared” by Israeli forces. According to a recent Israeli assessment, Hamas now has more fighters in the northern areas of Gaza, which the IDF seized in the fall at the cost of hundreds of soldiers, than it does in Rafah in the south.
Hamas is now waging a guerrilla war, involving ambushes and improvised bombs (often made from unexploded ordnance or captured IDF weapons), protracted operations that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser recently said could last through the end of 2024 at least. It could still strike in Israel; Hamas likely has some 15,000 mobilized fighters—roughly ten times the number of fighters who carried out the October 7 attacks. Further, more than 80 percent of the group’s underground tunnel network remains usable for planning, storing weapons, and evading Israeli surveillance, capture, and attacks. Most of Hamas’s top leadership in Gaza remains intact. In sum, Israel’s fast-moving offensive in the fall has given way to a grinding war of attrition that would leave Hamas with the ability to attack Israeli civilians even if the IDF presses ahead with its campaign in southern Gaza.
Failed counterinsurgencies in the past often fixated on enemy body counts. The IDF is now engaged in the familiar game of whack-a-mole that bogged down U.S. troops in Afghanistan for years. Slavish attention to body counts tends to confuse tactical and strategic success and ignore the key measures that would show whether the strategic power of the opponent is growing even as the group’s immediate losses mount. For a terrorist or insurgent group, the key source of power is not the size of its current generation of fighters but its potential to gain supporters from the local community in the future.
THE SOURCES OF STRENGTH
The power of a militant group such as Hamas does not come from the typical material factors that analysts use to judge the might of states—including the size of their economy, the technological sophistication of their militaries, how much external support they enjoy, and the strength of their educational systems. Rather, the most crucial source of power of Hamas and other militant nonstate actors commonly referred to as “terrorist” or “insurgent” groups is the ability to recruit, especially its ability to attract new generations of the fighters and operatives who carry out the group’s lethal campaigns and are likely to die for the cause. And that ability to recruit is rooted, ultimately, in a single factor: the scale and intensity of support a group derives from its community.
The backing of a community allows a terrorist group to replenish its ranks, gain resources, avoid detection, and generally have more access to the human and material resources necessary to mobilize and sustain lethal campaigns of violence. Most terrorists, including Islamist groups in the Middle East, are walk-in volunteers, often either angry over the loss of family members or friends or more generally enraged at a powerful state’s use of heavy military force. These people often seek out recruiters whose identity could be revealed to security forces were it not for the willingness of community members to protect them. Terrorist groups tend to fight with weapons that have been either made by refashioning civilian materials or seized from state security forces, often with intelligence and assistance provided by members of the local community.
Most important, the support of a community is necessary for fostering a cult of martyrdom. People are less likely to volunteer for high-risk missions if their sacrifices go unnoticed. A community that honors the fallen fighters of a terrorist group helps sustain it; martyrdom legitimizes terrorist actions and encourages new recruits. Terrorists will act as they see fit, but it is the community that ultimately decides whether an individual’s sacrifice is accorded high status or whether it is broadly viewed as irrational, criminal, and worthy of contempt.
It is no surprise that terrorist groups often go to great lengths to curry favor with local communities. By embedding in social institutions, such as schools, universities, charities, and religious congregations, terrorist groups become a part of the fabric of communities, better able to win more recruits and the support of noncombatants.
Many cases showcase these dynamics. Hezbollahflourished with growing popular support among Shiites during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982 to 1999, evolving from a small clandestine terrorist group into a mainstream political party with an armed wing of around 40,000 fighters today. Strong community support powered the prolonged terrorist campaigns of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Shining Path in Peru, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) and al Qaeda in multiple countries.
Losing the support of a community can be devastating for terrorist groups. Following the U.S. occupation of Iraq in 2003, the number of fighters in the Sunni insurgency grew from 5,000 in the spring of 2004 to 20,000 by the fall of 2004 to 30,000 in February 2007, according to U.S. estimates. The more people the United States killed, the faster the insurgency grew. Indeed, the insurgency did not collapse until the United States shifted to a new approach, offering political and economic incentives to encourage Sunni tribes to oppose the terrorists. That shift ultimately decimated the insurgency, as the loss of local community support led to mass defections, actionable intelligence, and the rise of Sunni opposition forces called the Anbar Awakening. By 2009, the insurgency had virtually collapsed for one major reason: the loss of community support made it impossible for the terrorists to replenish their ranks.
HEARTS AND MINDS
These dynamics help account for Hamas’s staying power in its war with Israel. To assess the group’s true strength, analysts should consider the various dimensions of its support among Palestinians. These include its popularity as compared with its political rivals, the extent to which Palestinians view Hamas’s violence against Israeli civilians as acceptable, and how many Palestinians have lost family members in the ongoing Israeli invasion of Gaza. These factors, more than material ones, provide the best gauge of Hamas’s power to conduct a protracted terrorist campaign going forward.
Surveys of Palestinian opinion can help assess the extent of community support for Hamas. To account for the challenges of surveying the population in Gaza since October 7, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), a polling organization established in 1993 after the Oslo accords that collaborates with Israeli institutions, included interviews of displaced people in temporary shelters and roughly doubled the usual number of interviewed respondents given the uncertain and changing population distributions in the territory.
Five PSR surveys from June 2023 to the most recent, completed in June 2024, present a striking finding: on virtually every measure, Hamas has more support among Palestinians today than before October 7.
Political support for Hamas has grown, especially compared with its competitors. For instance, although Hamas and its main rival, Fatah, enjoyed roughly equivalent levels of support in June 2023, by June 2024 twice as many Palestinians supported Hamas (40 percent compared with 20 percent for Fatah).
The Israeli offensive is not turning Palestinians against Hamas.
Israel’s bombing and ground invasion of Gaza has neither dampened Palestinian support for attacks against Israeli civilians inside Israel nor markedly depressed support for the October 7 attack itself. In March 2024, 73 percent of Palestinians believed Hamas was right to launch the October 7 attack. These numbers are extremely high, not only after the attacks spurred Israel’s brutal campaign but also in light of the fact that a lower number, 53 percent, of Palestinians supported armed attacks on Israeli civilians in September 2023.
Hamas is enjoying a “rally round the flag” moment, helping explain why Gazans are not providing more intelligence to Israeli forces about the whereabouts of Hamas leaders and Israeli hostages. Support for armed attacks against Israeli civilians appears to have risen especially among Palestinians in the West Bank, which is now rightly on par with the consistently high levels of support for these attacks in Gaza, showing that Hamas has made extensive gains across Palestinian society since October 7.
The survey data also shows how Israel’s military campaign has affected Palestinians. As of March 2024, the weight of the perceived price of the war on the Palestinian population is remarkably high. Sixty percent of Palestinians in Gaza report having a family member killed in the current war, while over three-quarters report having a family member killed or injured, both numbers significantly higher than in December 2023. This punishment is not having a significant deterrent effect among Palestinians, failing to reduce their support for armed attacks against Israeli civilians and their support for Hamas.
Before October 7, Hamas had plateaued as a political force and, if anything, was in decline. The group feared that its cause—and the plight of the Palestinians more broadly—was being sidelined by the Abraham Accords, agreements that sought to normalize ties between Israel and Arab countries. Before its brazen assault on Israel on October 7, Hamas reckoned with a future of irrelevance, with Palestinians having fewer and fewer reasons to support the group.
After October 7, Palestinian support for Hamas has surged, to the detriment of Israel’s security. Yes, Israel has killed many thousands of Hamas fighters in Gaza. But these losses in the current generation of fighters are already being offset by the rise in support for Hamas and the group’s consequent ability to better recruit the next generation. In the meantime, until those new recruits arrive, all signs indicate that Hamas’s current fighters are likely more eager than ever to wage protracted guerrilla warfare against any Israeli targets they can strike.
THE POWER OF THE MESSAGE
The tremendous punishment Israel has unleashed on Gaza is surely driving many Palestinians to feel further enmity toward the Jewish state. But why is Hamas benefiting from this reaction? After all, its attack was the immediate cause of the war that has leveled large swaths of Gaza and killed so many people.
The answer lies in large part in Hamas’s sophisticated propaganda campaign, which constructs a favorable interpretation of events and weaves narratives that help the group win more supporters. To paraphrase the American psychoanalyst Edward Bernays, propaganda works not so much by creating and instilling fear and outrage as it does by redirecting these emotions toward concrete objectives. Hamas’s efforts are a prime example of this tactic. Since the war began, the group has disseminated a vast amount of material, mostly online, in a bid to rally the Palestinian people around its leadership and its pursuit of victory against Israel.
The Arabic Propaganda Analysis Team—a dedicated group of Arabic linguists who specialize in gathering and analyzing militant propaganda in Arabic—at the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats examined the Arabic propaganda produced by Hamas and its military wing, the Qassam Brigades, and distributed on the brigades’ official Telegram channel in the aftermath of October 7. This Telegram channel, which has over 500,000 subscribers, has released messages, images, videos, and other propaganda virtually every day since the October 7 attacks. A report by Mohamed Elgohari, the leader of this research team, parsed over 500 bits of propaganda from October 7, 2023, to May 27, 2024. It is not known how many Palestinians consume this material online, but Gaza and the West Bank have daily, albeit intermittent, Internet access. Hamas’s digital content mirrors its analog propaganda efforts in local community networks.
The material centers on three themes: the Palestinian people have no choice but to fight because Israel is bent on committing unspeakable atrocities against all Palestinians even if they are not involved in military operations; under Hamas’s leadership, Palestinians can defeat Israel on the battlefield; and those fighters who die in battle will be accorded honor and glory. Hamas has posted a vast number of videos, statements, and other material to make the case that its attack on Israel on October 7 was a necessary and justified response to Israeli occupation, atrocities, and aggression against the Palestinian people, including frequent incursions into the sacred al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by Israeli security forces and Israeli activists and settlers.
Consider a Hamas statement originally posted on January 22 and widely circulated even in Israeli media. This extensive declaration explains in depth the group’s justifications for attacking Israel, focusing on what it describes as long-standing grievances about the actions of the Israeli government and settlers, including Israeli intrusions at al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and restrictions placed on Palestinian worshipers there; the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank; the allegedly horrific treatment meted out to Palestinian detainees in Israel; and Israel’s functional siege and blockade of Gaza and imposition of apartheid-like policies in the West Bank. This statement is just one of dozens of posts making similar points.
Many videos, images, and posters emphasize Hamas’s military prowess, showcasing successful attacks on Israeli targets, particularly armored vehicles and tanks. These posts aim to project the group’s strength and effectiveness, suggesting that Hamas can inflict significant damage on its technologically superior adversary. In this propaganda, fighters appear in full combat gear and tactical uniforms, equipped with helmets, goggles, and advanced weaponry, highlighting their operational readiness. Religious symbolism, such as Koranic verses, also features heavily, casting Hamas’s struggle as a spiritual one. Propaganda helps elevate fallen fighters to the status of martyrs, who died fighting Israel in the service of a noble and divinely sanctioned cause. The glorification of their martyrdom inspires potential new recruits.
Hamas’s propaganda since October 7 is squarely in line with the results found in the PSR surveys of Palestinian attitudes. The tight fit between the substance of Hamas’s propaganda and the growing support found for Hamas in particular and for armed struggle against Israel in general in the PSR surveys suggests that either Hamas is stimulating that support or its propaganda reflects the key reasons for that support. Either way, Hamas is capitalizing on the war to grow stronger through the thickening and widening bonds between the community and the militant group.
THE STARK REALITY
After nine months of grueling war, it is time to recognize the stark reality: there is no military-only solution to defeat Hamas. The group is more than the sum of its current number of fighters. It is also more than an evocative idea. Hamas is a political and social movement with violence at its core, and it is not going away any time soon.
Israel’s current strategy of heavy military operations may kill some Hamas fighters, but this strategy is only strengthening the bonds between Hamas and the local community. For nine months, Israel has pursued virtually unfettered military operations in Gaza, with little evident progress toward any of its objectives. Hamas is neither defeated nor on the verge of defeat, and its cause is more popular and its appeal stronger than before October 7. In the absence of a plan for the future of Gaza and the Palestinian people that Palestinians might accept, the terrorists will keep coming back and in larger numbers.
But Israeli leaders appear no more willing to conceive of such a viable political plan than they were before October 7. There is little end in sight to the tragedy continuing to unfold in Gaza. The war will go on and on, more Palestinians will die, and the threat to Israel will only grow.
Iranian Horn Builds Her Nukes: Daniel 8
Iran to Triple Uranium Enrichment
Iran plans to triple its production of enriched uranium at its Fordow nuclear facility, according to a June 19 report from the Institute for Science and International Security.
Centrifuges: The report states that Iran recently informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that over the next three to four weeks, eight cascades, or clusters, of IR-6 centrifuges will be installed at the Fordow Enrichment Facility. This will bring Iran’s total to nearly 1,400 advanced centrifuges.
According to nuclear weapons expert and Institute president David Albright, this will increase the facility’s ability to enrich uranium by 360 percent.
People didn’t know they had that many [centrifuges] ready to go. … At the Fordow plant, the centrifuges are called the IR-6s and it’s the most advanced centrifuge Iran operates.
—David Albright
Weapons: Fordow could soon have enough enriched uranium that:
- In a couple of weeks, Iran could produce three nuclear weapons.
- In one month, it could produce five.
- In two months, it could produce nine.
Iran has not only the material to build a nuclear weapon, but also the means and the will to do it quickly.
The Russian horn issues a nuclear warning: Revelation 7
Putin Issues Nuclear Warning to West
Published Jun 21, 2024 at 11:34 AM EDTUpdated Jun 21, 2024 at 4:38 PM EDT
Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened on Thursday to change Russia’s nuclear doctrine over claims that the West is “lowering the threshold for nuclear weapon use.”
Putin was speaking at a press conference following his trip to North Korea and Vietnam and the warning comes amid rising tensions between Russia and the West over Putin’s ongoing war in neighboring Ukraine.
Russia’s nuclear doctrine lays out the conditions under which it can use such weapons. Putin said Moscow may justify the use of nuclear weapons if another nation uses them against Russia or if the “very existence of the state is put under threat.”
Russia is aware that a “potential adversary” is working on new elements “related to lowering the threshold of nuclear weapon use,” Putin said during the press briefing.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a U.S.-based think tank, said Thursday that Putin was likely responding in part to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s remarks on June 17 that members of the military alliance are discussing increased nuclear readiness in the face of growing threats from Russia and China, “even though Stoltenberg did not discuss lowering the threshold for nuclear weapon use.”
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Newsweek has contacted NATO for comment.
Putin’s rhetoric “deliberately aims to present Russia’s aggression in Ukraine as an existential war for Russia’s sovereignty,” the ISW assessed.
The Russian leader “likely invoked the possibility of lowering the threshold for nuclear weapon use to imply that he reserves the right to use nuclear weapons if his forces are decisively defeated on the frontlines in order to deter Ukraine’s allies from reaching a common strategic objective of decisively defeating Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — an outcome which is in the West’s interests,” the think tank said.
“Putin’s nuclear threat is part of an ongoing Kremlin nuclear blackmail campaign aimed at dissuading Ukraine’s allies from decisively committing to defeating Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and is therefore highly unlikely to result in actual nuclear escalation,” it said.
The ISW added: “A Russian strategic defeat in Ukraine does not threaten Russia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity (but it can threaten the stability of Putin’s regime).”
Earlier this month, Putin told the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that his country’s nuclear doctrine is “a living instrument” that can be changed.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov also warned that Moscow could amend its nuclear doctrine because of “the unacceptable and escalatory actions” of the West.
Ryabkov didn’t elaborate on what specific changes could be made, but said recent actions by the U.S. and Ukraine’s other NATO allies were forcing Moscow to think the decision through.
“The challenges that are multiplying as a result of the unacceptable and escalatory actions of the United States and its NATO allies, without any doubt, raise before us the full question of how the basic documents in the field of nuclear deterrence can be brought more into line with current needs,” Ryabkov was cited by Russia’s state-run news agency Interfax as saying on June 11.
Do you have a tip on a world news story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about the Russia-Ukraine war? Let us know via worldnews@newsweek.com.
The great powers are itching for another nuclear arms race: Revelation 16
The great powers are itching for another nuclear arms race. Who will stop them?
June 21, 2024 3:08 AM PT
In early June, the Biden administration announced a more “competitive” nuclear weapons strategy, after Moscow and Beijing reportedly spurned U.S. efforts to discuss arms control. The new approach includes the possibility of increasing America’s deployment of strategic nuclear weapons. The administration’s more muscular stance may be only a small down payment on an even larger nuclear buildup foreshadowed in a recent report mandated by Congress. The public has a compelling interest in participating in this discussion now, before the bills and risks come due.
“How much is enough” regarding America’s nuclear forces is not a new question. It has been debated by political, military and scientific leaders since the first two nuclear weapons were used to end the Second World War almost 80 years ago. Today, Washington and our two most likely nuclear adversaries, Russia and China, are all examining their nuclear ledgers to account for growing tensions in great-power relations, new technologies such as artificial intelligence and cyber warfare and emerging battlefields in space.
Will the American people have a voice in this debate? Historically, there have been moments when public opinion has driven nuclear policy, and not simply through elected representatives in Congress voting on defense appropriations. Widespread concerns over radioactive fallout helped drive negotiations that banned atmospheric nuclear testing in the early 1960s. In the early 1980s, millions turned out in the United States and Europe to protest the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear weapons, which put pressure on President Reagan and the U.S.S.R.’s Mikhail Gorbachev to negotiate a ban on these systems.
Yet it has been decades since the American public has weighed in en masse on nuclear policy, leaving the discussions to a small number of government, civilian and military bureaucrats and members of Congress.
The rest of us have practical and existential reasons to get engaged. To begin, the resources required to maintain or expand our nuclear arsenal are substantial — hundreds of billions of dollars for new land-based nuclear missiles, bombers and submarines. This will come at a substantial cost to other defense capabilities and domestic priorities. Even more profoundly, a more aggressive nuclear policy and the mere existence of more weapons may increase the risk of nuclear use, which poses an existential threat to us all. As the former CIA deputy director for intelligence rightly said to then-national security advisor Henry Kissinger decades ago, “Once nuclear weapons start landing, the response is likely to be irrational.”
Based on research by independent experts published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the United States today deploys more than 1,700 nuclear weapons. Roughly half of these warheads are on “day to day” alert, ready to be launched within minutes. Half of these are deployed at sea, immune from attack. Any rational nuclear adversary — say Russia or China, alone or together — must conclude that the use of even one nuclear weapon against the United States or its allies in Europe or Asia would likely trigger a massive American nuclear response that could obliterate an aggressors’ leadership, military forces and industry. And the sobering reality is that a rational U.S. president must conclude the same with respect to Russia, which deploys roughly the same number of nuclear weapons as the U.S., and China, with a much smaller but growing nuclear inventory.
Adding more nuclear weapons, missile silos, bombers or submarines to the mix in China, Russia or the U.S. — or applying new technologies, whether in speed or power — will not change the nuclear fundamentals: Use even one nuclear weapon and risk nuclear retaliation and a wider nuclear war that would destroy nations. The wise course for the U.S. is to ensure an adequate nuclear deterrent that places a premium on survivability, which means firepower and totals limited to the current arsenal, or even fewer.
Everyday Americans can and should campaign against this dangerous nuclear expansion. And beyond that, we can support what the United States has slowly been doing, reducing the risks of a nuclear use by reducing global nuclear arms through sound security policies and diplomacy.
We can also support efforts to make the stockpile we have safer. In a rare but laudable bipartisan initiative, Congress directed the Biden administration to conduct an internal review of America’s nuclear command-and-control systems, including “fail-safe” steps to strengthen safeguards against cyber warfare threats and the unauthorized, inadvertent or accidental use of a nuclear weapon. The review is due out in the fall, and it will almost certainly call for new investments to securely maintain a nuclear deterrent for as long as one is needed. That would be money well spent by Washington — and something that should be encouraged in every nuclear-armed state.
No question, the U.S. is now in an across-the-board competition with China and Russia. In Europe, it is centered on the war in Ukraine and deterring any further attacks by Russia on our NATO allies. The competition with China is much broader: There is an increasing military component in the South China sea and Taiwan, but the economic and technology race is as consequential.
“Winning” this competition will require a number of increased investments and initiatives, such as shoring up our conventional military capabilities, leading the artificial intelligence revolution, developing defenses against cyber attacks and expanding clean energy alternatives. Making expensive investments in nuclear capabilities beyond what is adequate for deterrence would mean running this race carrying a heavy sandbag on our shoulders.
When it comes to nuclear weapons, less is more.
Steve Andreasen was the National Security Council’s staff director for defense policy and arms control from 1993 to 2001. He teaches at the public affairs school of the University of Minnesota.
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