Sergey Karaganov: Here’s why Russia has to consider launching a nuclear strike on Western Europe
If things continue as they are, Moscow will have no choice but to use the ultimate weapon
By Professor Sergey Karaganov, honorary chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and academic supervisor at the School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow
This month, there has been an active debate in Russia about the possibility of Moscow preemptively using nuclear weapons. Which would be at variance with the established doctrine. It began after the publication of an article by Professor Sergey Karaganov, which prompted a wide response from the domestic expert community.
While Karaganov has been advocating relaxing the rules, others have different opinions: for example, Fyodor Lukyanov thinks the West cannot be 'sobered up' by using the bomb, and Ilya Fabrichnikov believes Russia should not 'take NATO's bait' and unleash the ultimate weapon.
This is Karaganov’s follow up response to his critics.
During over seventy years of mutual deterrence, atomic weapons have saved the world. People just took this for granted. However, now we see that things have changed and the unthinkable is happening: the West is responsible for a major war in the underbelly of a major nuclear power.
The official history of the creation of these weapons is known, but in my opinion there is also a higher power at play. It is as if the Lord God saw that a large part of humanity had gone mad, having started two world wars in a generation, and gave us these nuclear weapons, which are weapons of the apocalypse. He wanted them to be, to be in the front of our minds, at all times, and to scare us.
But now people have lost their fear.
Over the last few decades in the United States, Western Europe and even partly in Russia, what I call “strategic parasitism” has spread: the belief that there can never be a major war and that there will never be a major war. People are accustomed to peace, and it is on this basis that modern Western ideology has grown. In addition, there is now an unprecedented amount of propaganda around, to an extent unprecedented even during the Cold War.
People are simply being fed lies, and they are afraid to say what they really think. As a result of more than 70 years of peace, the public's sense of self-preservation has become dysfunctional, and it is further stifled by the extraordinarily virulent agitprop, part of which claims that Russia would never be able to attack Western Europe.
Official Western propaganda pumps the idea that the West can do anything it likes and Moscow will just put up with it. This has now become very clear and vivid.
Full article
If things continue as they are, Moscow will have no choice but to use the ultimate weapon
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