ER Editor: On what the B61-12 nuclear bomb actually is, readers may be interested in this 2016 reports on the weapon getting approved:
Risky US nuclear bomb gets green light
Of note:
The most controversial nuclear bomb ever planned for the U.S. arsenal – some say the most dangerous, too – has received the go-ahead from the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
The agency announced on Aug. 1 that the B61-12 – the nation’s first guided, or “smart” nuclear bomb – had completed a four-year development and testing phase and is now in production engineering, the final phase before full-scale production slated for 2020.
This announcement comes in the face of repeated warnings from civilian experts and some former high-ranking military officers that the bomb, which will be carried by fighter jets, could tempt use during a conflict because of its precision. The bomb pairs high accuracy with explosive force that can be regulated.
President Barack Obama has consistently pledged to reduce nuclear weapons and forgo weapons with new military capabilities. Yet the B61-12 program has thrived on the political and economic clout of defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin Corp., as documented in an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting last year.
The B61-12 – at $11 billion for about 400 bombs, the most expensive U.S. nuclear bomb ever – illustrates the extraordinary power of the atomic wing of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the “military industrial complex,” which has now rebranded itself the “nuclear enterprise.” The bomb lies at the heart of an ongoing modernization of America’s nuclear arms, projected to cost $1 trillion over the next 30 years.
See this article from the end of 2020:
B61-12 Nuclear Bomb: The Most Powerful Nuclear Weapon Ever?
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See this on the 101st Airborne coming to Europe –
101st Airborne Soldiers Head to Europe as US Amasses 6,000 Troops to Deter Russia
We very much doubt that Russia would be deterred by this.
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The whole of Europe is a battlefield
MANLIO DINUCCI Via Voltaire Network
The whole of the European continent now harbors stockpiles of weapons designed for a global confrontation, for a World War.
The United States sees Western Europe as the battleground to confront Russia.
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) confirms in January the information given by Grandangolo in December 2022 on the basis of a document from the US Air Force: the C-17A Globemaster aircraft has been authorized to transport to Italy and other European countries the USA B61-12 nuclear bomb.
With officials from the Biden Administration announcing that the B61-12s would have been dispatched early in December, we believe that the new US nuclear bombs are already arriving in Europe to be deployed against Russia.
The USA and NATO are pouring into Ukraine huge quantities of ammunition for the heavy artillery supplied to the armed forces of Kyiv. The United States — according to official data — has so far sent to Ukraine more than a million rounds of 115mm howitzer ammunition, plus tens of thousands of missiles. About 300,000 projectiles come from US military depots in Israel. The shipment of weapons is managed by an international network, in which Camp Darby plays a central role, the largest US arsenal outside the mother country, linked to the port of Livorno and the military airport of Pisa. The United Kingdom, France, Poland and Finland are supplying tanks to Kyiv, and Poland is acquiring Abrams tanks from the USA, some of which may be destined for the Ukraine.
At the same time, the USA and NATO are potentiating the deployment of their forces in Europe, increasingly backed by Russia. In Romania, NATO has deployed Awacs planes, equipped with the most sophisticated electronic installations, kept constantly in flight near Russian airspace. Still in Romania, the Pentagon has installed the 101st Airborne Division, which is deployed in Europe for the first time since the Second World War.
NATO and the EU set up “a task force on resilience and critical infrastructures”. “NATO – declares the Council of the European Union – remains the foundation of our collective defence. We recognize the value of a stronger European Defense which contributes to transatlantic security and is complementary and inter-operational with NATO”.
Brief summary of the international press review Grandangolo of Friday January 20, 2023 at 8:30 p.m. on the Italian TV channel Byoblu
M.-A.
Source
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Featured image, 101st Airborne: U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Justin Moeller
Featured image, B61-12: Reuters/Department of Defense
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Thanks!
As we know, the aim of the two previous so-called World Wars was already to kill Europe. Making the whole of continental Europe, Asia and Africa a battlefield has always been OK for the Military industrial complex.
The war in Ukraine to maintain the European Union under tutelage
by Thierry Meyssan
https://www.voltairenet.org/article218706.html
24 January 2023
(…)
The influx of weapons to Ukraine is a decoy: the majority of the materials sent do not reach the battlefield. We announced that they would be sent to start another war in the Sahel [4], which the President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, has publicly confirmed by attesting that many of the weapons destined for Ukraine were already in the hands of African jihadists [5].
(…)
Let us now study the economic war. (…)
In other words, the so-called “sanctions” had a negligible effect on Russia. They severely disrupted its trade for the first two months, but are no longer a problem today. Moreover, they did not cost the US anything and did not affect it at all.
(…)
On the other hand, we are observing an upheaval in the European economy, which is forced to borrow massively to support the Kiev regime. We have no statistics on the extent of these loans, nor do we know who the creditors are. It is clear, however, that European governments are appealing to Washington under the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022. Everything the Europeans give to Ukraine has a cost, but it will not be accounted for until after the war. Only then will the bill be established. And it will be exorbitant.
(…)
Nothing has changed since the first Secretary General of NATO, Lord Ismay, declared that the real aim of the Alliance was “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” [8]. The Soviet Union disappeared and Germany took the lead in the European Union. If he were still alive, Lord Ismay would probably say that the objective of NATO is to keep Russia out, the Americans in, and the European Union under control.
Germany, for whom the sabotage of these pipelines is the most serious blow since the end of the Second World War, took it without flinching. At the same time, it swallowed the Biden plan to rescue the US economy at the expense of the German car industry. To all this, it reacted by moving closer to China and avoiding anger with Poland, the new US asset in Europe. It is now PROPOSING TO REBUILD ITS INDUSTRY BY DEVELOPING MUNITIONS FACTORIES FOR THE ALLIANCE.
As a result, Germany’s acceptance of US suzerainty has been shared by the European Union, which Berlin controls [9].
In 1992, when the Russian Federation had just been born on the ruins of the Soviet Union, Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, commissioned the Straussian [10] Paul Wolfowitz to write a report which has only come to us largely redacted. Excerpts from the original report published by the New York Times and the Washington Post show that Washington no longer considered Russia a threat, but the European Union a potential rival [11]. It stated: “While the United States supports the project of European integration, we must be careful to prevent the emergence of a purely European security system that would undermine NATO, especially its integrated military command structure. In other words, Washington approves of a European defence subordinate to NATO, but IS READY TO DESTROY THE EUROPEAN UNION IF IT IMAGINES ITSELF BECOMING A POLITICAL POWER CAPABLE OF STANDING UP TO IT.
The current U.S. strategy, which does not weaken Russia but the European Union under the pretext of fighting Russia, is the second concrete application of the Wolfowitz doctrine. Its first application, in 2003, consisted in punishing Jacques Chirac’s France and Gerhard Schröder’s Germany for having opposed NATO’s destruction of Iraq [12].
This is exactly what the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said at a press conference after the Allies’ meeting in Ramstein on January 20. While he had demanded that each participant donate weapons to Kiev, he acknowledged that “This year, it would be very, very difficult to militarily eject the Russian forces from every inch of Russian-occupied Ukraine. In other words, THE ALLIES MUST BLEED, but there is no hope of winning anything in 2023 over Russia.
Third remark: This war is not being waged against Moscow, but TO WEAKEN THE EUROPEAN UNION.