Fears of Russia attack lead not to peace feelers but nuke counter-threats

Cambridge UK — I woke yesterday to a splendid day: bright sunshine, blue sky and a brisk wind carrying no hint of pollution. The bronchial infection that had plagued me for the past week seemed to be responding well to the antibiotic an NHS physician had prescribed and I was even starting to think I might bet able to resume my jogging routine.

Then I spotted a copy of the Sunday Times. It sported a banner headline that blew away all the my good feeling in an instant: “British Fighter Jets to Carry Nuclear Bombs” the boldface words screamed, followed by the subhed: “Ministers seek airborne tactical weapons in biggest defense expansion since Cold War.”

There are so many euphemisms, pieces of misinformation, false assumptions, ignored history and evidence of political insanity packed into those few lines of headline they could fill a feature story in the New Yorker or the London Review of Books or even to justify a book, but there’s no time for that.

This is potential nuclear war we’e talking about, not shoddy journalism.

Just by way of example, those “fighters” the British government plans to use to deliver nukes to targets in Russia won’t be British, they’ll be US-built, fifth-generation F35A Lightning fighter-bombers and the bombs they’ll be carrying, two at a time, are US-made B61-12 dial-a-size thermonuclear bombs. Each is capable of producing a nuclear blasts ranging from 0.3 kilotons to 50 kilotons, the latter option being equal to three or four Nagasaki-sized nukes. Each plane costs about £90 million, plus the cost of continuing upgrades, fixes and maintenance, while each B61-12 bomb goes for £22 million. When you add up the amount of money just the first 35 planes Britain would be require, the cost of the two bombs each plane can carry, plus the per-hour flight operating cost of £31,000, they’re talking about an initial start-op cost to get Britain’s nuclear force off the ground that would exceed £5 billion (and counting). That however, doesn’t include the need to construct secure bunkers for safely storing the weapons, upgrading the airbases for the fleet, and maintaining both the planes and their weapons, and then of course the cost of the ground crew, the maintenance eam and their training, the pilots and their training, etc.

Oh, and this is all because Whitehall wants to have two ways of attacking its enemies with nukes, not just one. It’s a pathtic effort to emulate the “nuclear triad” concept that the US tries to maintain, of land-based nuclear missiles, submarine-launched missiles and a fleet of strategic bombers. Since Britain’s bombers are obsolete, though,and developing a new bomber is a decade-long project at least, Starmer’s military planners are turning to mini-bombers in the form of the F-35A.

Meanwhile, to keep the sub-launched missiles delivery option viable will require the relacement of the current four aging Trident missle-launching subs. That cost was estimater in March 2024 to be £36.7 billion plus a contingeny of another £10 billion for cost over-runs. As well, PM Starmer wants to have UK-made “sovereign” warheads for all those massive Trident ICBM missiles, not US ones (perhaps worried Trump might, in a crunch go all TACO, and push a kill-switch on the US-made warheads). That project, including the cost of developing the capacity to make those warheads domestically, and then of constructing them, is estimated at £15 billion more.

It must be noted that Lockheed Martin’s F-35 in all of its three versions (for Army, RAF, and Navy/ Marines) has long been widely criticized in the US itself as a flying lemon. Designed to serve many roles and service requirements, like STOVL ability for the Navy and Marines and close support for the Army, catapult launch and cable cqtch for aircraft carrier use, the plane does none well, or at least as well as existing specially designed planes for each purpose. While faster than most other fighters designed specially for one mission, for instance, the F35A cannot maintain top speed for long before risking losing the radar-absorbing stealth coating on its metal surfaces. And while an admittedly agile flying machine in the air when not toting two hydrogen bombs, it is highly vulnerable to less advanced (and vastly cheaper) enemy fighters and antiaircraft missiles when loaded down. There’s a reason the late Sen. John McCain, a decorated Navy pilot, called this flying pile of design compromises ”a scandal and a tragedy.” As chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he tried repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, to kill the program.

The Labour government’s new security review program is literally a plan for war, or at least for what Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer calls a national “war-footing.” It is obvious that doing so would be a decade-long process, with Starmer’s own Secretary of Defense Healey, admitting the country is currently unprepared for such an attack or for fighting such a war for more than a few days. How than can Britain be provocatively providing its Storm Shadow cruise missile (range 155 miles) to Ukraine so the Ukrainian military can launch them across the border against Russian targets as Starmer has been been doing for several months?.

What meds are the blokes in Whitehall and Starmer’s inner circle of national security people taking? We know that the Trump Whitehouse is virtually a drug den these days with Elon Musk hopped up on speed, Ketamine and Adderall and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth a notorious lush. Is there a dispensary in Whitehall too?

What I was reading in that Sunday Times issue last weekend took me back to the scary days of the late 1970s when the US, under President Jimmy Carter, began developing a plan to base intermediate-range nuclear-tipped Pershing missiles and Tomahawk cruise missiles in NATO countries (Britain, West Germany, Netherlands, Belgium and Italy), putting them within range of most of the Soviet Union west of the Urals, Including Moscow.

This madly provocative plan of placing nuclear weapons controlled by the US or UK just a few minutes’ flight time from Moscow, Kaliningrad, Sevastopol, and Soviet missile silos and airbases, was devised by Zbigniew Brzeziński, President Jimmy Carter’s Russia-loathing National Security Advisor. It was carried out by the Reagan administration, which took over from Carter, but led to huge public protests in the US and in Europe, where of course people didn’t like being made a target for Soviet missiles. Eventually the missiles were removed. The nightmare of that decade helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. But before that happened, the hair-raising experience of several close calls with nuclear war also convinced Reagan, from a position of American strength, to make the unusual decision to negotiate an brief end to the Cold War with then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (albeit an unforrtunately all too short one).

The Starmer government’s decision in its just released Strategic Review, which the London Times describes as “the biggest development in the UK’s deterrent since the Cold War,” also calls for expanding the number of men and women in uniform, adding up to a dozen new attack submarines, and doubling the size of the Navy’s surface fleet. All this will cost an enormous amount of money, not just this year but through 2029, if Labour manages to hang onto its Parliamentary majority (and beyond, since such big programs don’t just take a few years).

It should be clear that making a sudden return to those dark Cold War days in the late ‘60s and ‘80s, if not blocked by Parliament, would spell the end of any promise by Labour to make good on any of its major campaign promises made a year ago.

Forget restoring adequate funding and staffing to the long-defunded and struggling National Health Service, forget filling the potholes plaguing the nation’s roads, forget building 1.5 million new homes and ending the two-child limit on the child tax credit. As for expanding the reach of the winter heating assistanne payment, at least to what it was before it became means tested in 2024, pensioners will have to look up in the sky at the patrolling F-35s with their deadly cargo of twin H-bombs and think, “Oh, there it goes.”

As long as I’m talking about ignored history and misinformation in that Times story’s headlines, let’s go at it systematically.

First of all, about those F-35 “fighter” jets. The reality is they cease to be fighter jets when their fuselages have been altered by the addition of large farings to allow the fuselage to internally accommodate two 700 lb thermonuclear gravity bombs. At this point, lugging all that weight plus a full load of ruel makes the planes little more than high-speed bomb transporters (especially because, as they have no built-in guns, they are likely to need to carry at least some air-to-air missiles for self-defense if they are going to make it to their targets). They clearly would not make the grade as fighters under such circumstances.

In fact, the design of these planes with their supposedly radar-absorbing coatings to theoretically make them invisible to radar, and their bomb-carrying configuration, it is clear that they are intended to be first-strike strategic weapons systems, not defensive ones or retaliatory ones.*

The idea is for pilots to fly these planes into a nation with advanced radars, avoiding detection, and to then, with pinpoint accuracy, take out targets like still-loaded ICBM missile silos, leadership concentrations, whether a presidential office, a military HQ or a communication or transportation hub. (There would be no need for fancy radar-evading coatings if these planes were intended to respond to an attack, rather than initiate one, because if the F35 attacks were retaliatory, the US or Britain would already have launched their nuclear missiles, and would already have destroyed enemy radars, airports and military bases and anti-aircraft defenses. The job of the slower fighter-bomber response in that case would be taking out remaining targets that had survived the initial attack, which would not require stealth planes.

As for being “tactical’ weapons, the military mission of the F-35A with its two B16-12 hydrogen bomb cargo is to go deep into enemy territory and obliterate critical targets with precision. Its 1350-mile range, just using its internal fuel tanks (external tanks would create a radar image), would enable this plane to-fly from the UK to Kaliningrad (880 miles) with plenty of fuel left to make it bck to Western Europe. The accuracy of the bombs makes it clear they are not primarily intended for mass destruction, but rather for hitting potential retaliatory missiles in their silos, or destroying command-and-control targets, which are “strategic” not ‘tactical.”

Things get really outrageous as Starmer’s Labor government opts for bombs over butter with his Secretary of Defense (sic) John Healey saying, ‘“The world is definitely becoming more dangerous. Nuclear risks are rising. We face now, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, seriously increasing the risks of state-on-state conflict.” “ Ominous words to be sure, yet as he says them he and Starmer are doing exactly that by calling for a major shift to creating a fleet of supersonic fighter-bombers, each armed with two thermonuclear bombs, both of which are capable of being set to explode with the force of three-to-four Nagasaki-sized bombs, enough explosive power for a single plane to destroy a large metropolis.

Sophie Bolt, general secretary of the venerable Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, an organization that for 67 years has been calling for and organizing around demanding an end to this nuclear madness, says, “The Starmer government’s plan to buy a fleet of US F35A stealth fighter-bombers has nothing to do with the security interests of British people. The majority of the population (61%) oppose US nuclear weapons being stationed here. Instead it has everything to do with Britain helping the US prepare to carry out a nuclear war.” She adds, “The F35A fighter jets have been designed to deliver satellite-guided B61-12 nuclear bombs. These bombs are described by military experts as ‘the most dangerous in the US nuclear arsenal.’ Why? Because, they are designed to be used ‘on the battlefield’.”

Nuclear strategists think that if nuclear bombs can be made small enough — and the bombs carried by the F35A can reportedly detonate with “just’ the equivalent of 0.3 kilotons, which would be 300 tons of TNT, perhaps if such nuke were exploded, taking out a bomb factory or an enemy country’s secret continuity of government bomb shelter, nobody would get upset enough to risk replying with a nukel That however is a hugh bet to make. Far more likely would be a tit-for-tat nuclear escalation, which countless war games have shown tend to become full-scale nuclear war within days or even hours.

Bolt says, “With the rapid escalation taking place again in Ukraine right now, the US deployment of these so-called ‘battlefield’ nuclear bombs across Europe and here in Britain risks this conflict again escalating to the brink of nuclear war – as we saw happen in November last year. We urge the government to stop its reckless warmongering. It is making us poorer and the world more dangerous. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Defense Secretary John Healey need to reject this US nuclear deal and scrap the disastrous replacement of its nuclear submarines.”

She says, “The hundreds of billions in public funds should instead be redirected into rebuilding our public services, ending poverty and meeting Britain’s climate action goals. This is the security we actually need.”

Addendum: In May 2022, eight airmen of the Vernont Air anational Guard erried eight of their Guard unit’s F-38s from Burlington VT to Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany to spend several weeks training with their German counterparts. At the time Army Maj. Gen. Greg Knight, the adjutant general of Vermont in a public release wrote; “We are proud to send our Airmen to support the collective defense of our allies and partners. This deployment demonstrates some of the strategic capabilities (author’s emphasis) the Vermont Air National Guard can provide to the nation when needed.”

What’s needed at this dangerous moment is not this kind of war mongering by the aus but for a US leader, ideally one who is in a position of strength, to reach out as President Reagan did to Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev, with a proposal to mutually step back from the nuclear precipice and armed confrontation and to begin talks to eliminate nuclear weapons and war as a way to resolve international conflicts.

Some years back, I wrote an exposé on how Bernie Sanders, the progressive standard bearer and self-styled independent democratic socialist US Senator from Vermont, while posing as an opponent of “wastefu; military spending,” was a big backer of having a F35A fighter squadron based at the Burlington Airport with the state’s Air National Guard unit. When local residents objected on political grounds, environmental grounds, concerns about the noise of the planes’ take-offs and safety concerns, Sanders insisted misleadingly that the planes would never be used or reconfigured to be capable of carrying nuclear weapons, but were meant to provide national defense against an enemy attack. In fact the Pentagon conceded at the time that all Air Force F35A planes are to be retrofitted with the enlarged farings to enable them to be nuclear bombers, and there is no way those planes would play any useful rule in national defense as fighters. Indeed I was told their role in the event of a global crisis would be to be ferried across the Atlantic to forward bases near Russia where they’d be loaded with pre-stored B61-12 nukes. (For the full article, which ran in the Sept. 2019 print version of Counterpunch magazin, please go to: https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/vol-26-no-3.pdf and scroll down to pages 18-21.

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