Sleepwalking to doomsday amid Ukraine war

Sandeep Dikshit

Deputy Editor

Atomic scientists, including 13 Nobel laureates, last week set the ‘Doomsday Clock’ closer to midnight than ever before. The clock shows how close humanity is to annihilation. The world was farthest from doomsday in 1991 when the Cold War ended. The clock was then 17 minutes to midnight.

Since then, as hostilities all over the world inched up, the clock was at 100 seconds to midnight since 2020, which too was uncomfortably close. Now, at 90 seconds to midnight — the theoretical point of annihilation — the clock’s creators, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, say threats of a nuclear war, disease and climate volatility have formed a combustible combination that could leave the world in acute misery, if not ruins, for decades.

What changed last week to move the clock closer to doomsday? Russia is unwilling to give up the territories it captured in Ukraine; its back is up after decades of the US deliberately avoiding diplomacy and trying to bottle it up through an acquiescent proxy in Ukraine. Moscow is convinced that the current crop of ‘globalists’ in the White House can only be checkmated by securing the Black Sea and neutralising its cat’s paw in Kyiv forever.

On the other hand, the ‘destroy Russia forever’ policy is immutable for the US, the UK, Poland and the Baltic nations — all countries that have been hostile to Moscow for centuries and have sent or funded armies in the past to bring down Russia.

What has changed is that the West thinks it has no way out after sinking huge money — $15 billion alone from the US to pay salaries in Ukraine — and its war fever is now acquiring an uncontrollable hue that is bringing it closer to a nuclear confrontation with Russia. US President Joe Biden’s statements just 10 months apart illustrate how the West could be sleepwalking away from its alleged blueprint of waging a contained war in Ukraine.

In March last year, Biden said in Pennsylvania that “the idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment and have planes, tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews, just understand, don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say, that’s called World War III.”

However, by the end of last year, the Pentagon shipped the advanced anti-tank Javelin missiles to Ukraine. After they were unable to help Ukraine turn the tide, the supply of offensive equipment was upgraded to HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System), the sophisticated multiple-rocket launcher, both of them incidentally manufactured by Lockheed Martin.

The White House globalists have now sleepwalked to tanks and fighter aircraft even as the mask slipped off one of their flock in Germany. “We are fighting a war against Russia,” said German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock during her address last week at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France.

Russia has reacted by terming the presence of tanks from the West ‘direct involvement’ in the war, an interpretation that is worrisome. The armoured element in the military is not purely defensive and since they will be taking back the lost land, they will be offensive in this sense.

The transfer of F-16 fighter jets will be an even pricklier proposition. It will bring right in the open NATO involvement that has been underplayed with the dispatch of mercenaries and ammunition to Ukraine. The NATO’s inevitable training of aircrew and allowing its use of airbases outside Ukraine will only confirm that Baerbock’s observation was not lapsus linguae, but a cat-out-of-the-bag moment.

While the southern end is well-known, the quieter arm of the pincer movement is in Russia’s north. Talks are at an advanced stage between Finland and Estonia to turn the Gulf of Finland into NATO’s ‘internal sea’. The integration of their coastal missile defence systems will bar the Gulf to Russian shipping heading to St Petersburg, as per Estonian Defence Minister Hanno Pevkur. The port is a crucial lifeline for Russia, accounting for one-fifth of its cargo on global commercial routes, worth $30 billion annually.

The risk-reward ratio for supplying tanks and fighter jets to Ukraine and erecting a missile mesh over the Gulf of Finland is likely to be as low as the introduction of Javelins and HIMARS. But as Biden’s statements 10 months apart indicate, the hateful emotions and the dynamics of the situation are subverting all attempts at rational calculation. Biden’s upping of the Ukrainian ante might be meant to ease the pressure of allegations of mishandling of classified documents that has ‘embarrassed’ and ‘outraged’ even his party’s Senators Richard Durbin and Debbie Stabenow. The Republicans are scenting blood and questioning his sudden rapprochement with China as the think tank where the documents were found had tried to promote closer engagement with Beijing.

The proxy war, though extremely sophisticated and encompassing diverse areas such as trade, manufacturing, technology, military and soft power, has clearly not been thought through. Apart from the fact that the more weapons that NATO sends into Ukraine to defeat Russia, the more will be its devastation, escalation also leads to a situation with unpredictable consequences.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has warned NATO that Moscow’s defeat in Ukraine could trigger a nuclear war. There are also reports of Ukraine storing donated military stockpiles in its nuclear plants. In the event of a catastrophe, everyone will pretend to be blameless. The ripple effect of ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’, dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, was not substantial for the world at large. A similar conflagration in Ukraine will sink for decades a huge chunk of the world’s food and energy supplies. The ball is in the court of the globalists. They can either press ahead regardless of risks in trying to defeat Russia or recalculate taking into account the minute hand on the ‘Doomsday Clock’ that is slowly inching towards the midnight mark.

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