Commentary
Vaccines? No, American nuclear missiles
The United States — in the midst of a triumphant vaccination campaign thanks to ‘America First’ — is sending us not life-saving medicine but rather hypersonic nuclear missiles. This is not a new Cold War. It is much worse.
Vaccination in Italy is languishing, even though it is being operated under military guidance, by the high-profile Draghi government and in the hands of a large, heterogeneous and stable coalition. In the rest of Europe, it is almost worse, and in the chaos, the dark protests for “freedom” from the hyper-nationalist and populist right wing are growing and returning.
Having rejected the radical choice of suspending patents and direct production, we are subjected to the mercy of the markets: i.e. multinational drug companies. But the disease is not subsiding, the social crisis is spreading and thank goodness that there is still the organized social protest of the new types of workers.
One would expect some help from our U.S. allies. They have thrown the world in such turmoil with so many “humanitarian” wars that a bit of real humanitarianism would not hurt. In the marches of the PCI in the 1950s against the Marshall Plan, they used to sing “And now the Americans are treating us like brothers / They’re sending us pea soup from America”: the movement was defeated, but at least the soup arrived.
But now, the United States — in the midst of a triumphant vaccination campaign thanks to “America First” — is announcing that a large package of new, ultra-modern hypersonic nuclear missiles will arrive in Europe.
Thus, the Catholic Democrat Joe Biden is treating the Pope’s preaching against war as nothing more than electoral talk. And such talk is worthless.
The fact that he’s doing so serves as explanation for his recent outbursts against the Kremlin “killer” — positioning himself as innocent. Because with the announcement by the U.S. Army Chief of Staff James C. McConville, then with the confirmation of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), we know that a “task force” — imagine that — is about to arrive composed of deadly self-propelled strategic weapons, ready to employ hypersonic missiles with new technology, which have centimeter-level accuracy, a frightening range and are armed with atomic warheads.
They will be deployed in European countries — probably in areas where atomic weapons are already present, such as Italy and Germany, and certainly in the “democratic” Poland that already has the anti-missile shield system in place, or in the now-Atlantic and poor Romania, not far from the “enemy,” Russia. And there will also be two “task forces” in the Pacific for China.
In the uncertainty about the European destination of the new missiles, it is fair to point out that the military bases in Italy and Europe will immediately become a target. Nothing less. Because this time we are facing a ghoulish rearmament that involves both the United States and their subordinate Atlantic allies, but also Putin’s Russia. The latter, responding to the decision by Donald Trump in 2019 to decree the birth of the new branch of U.S. defense for space warfare with billions in investment, has deemed it “proper” to rearm as a result by preparing new strategic hypersonic nuclear missiles, just as deadly as the American ones.
In fact, what had superficially seemed a wise choice — the reactivation, by Putin and then by Biden, of the START Treaty torn up by Trump — is failing.
We are facing the return of a new Comiso, which saw the deployment of cruise missiles on Italian and European territory that was symmetrical to the deployment of SS20s by the Soviet Union. Putin’s Russia, surrounded by the provocative enlargement of NATO to the East, is now reacting with that unique and pernicious Soviet legacy: rearmament.
This is not a new Cold War. It is much worse, and a name will have to be invented for the horrible era that is starting before us. It is also worse because these new hypersonic systems are unstoppable. Artificial intelligence decides, and it seems that it has already programmed the destruction of the planet and its desperate and careless humanity.
And this time, due to the speed of the new hypersonic weapon, it will not be possible to tell an “after” story about the nuclear risk for the world, with a film like the “science fiction” warning of Kubrick’s extraordinary Dr. Strangelove.
It is time for a pacifist protest which — as happened in 1981 for Comiso and in the best tradition of the Communist protest of the ’60s that called for the dissolution of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact (the latter dissolved in 1995) — would call for the dismantling, both in the West and in the East, of all missiles on European territory and would proclaim the priority of peace over any rearmament. If not now, when?
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/vaccini-no-missili-nucleari-usa/ on 2021-03-23