Letters from Vienna #149
Letter to a German Friend in Korea X
Will NATO cause World War Three?
Dear I.,
I regret that we never discussed what it was like for you to grow up in Germany; all we ever talked about was painting, movies and holidays.
My own childhood and youth was coloured by fear (which is why I remain overly anxious to this very day), especially an existential fear of nuclear conflict, and, of course (in particular), fear of the Russians. I even once read a book with the title: “The Third World War”, by Sir John Hackett, who’d commanded the BAOR (British Army of the Rhine), that I took extremely seriously indeed. It was only after I got hold of a volume at Foyles: “The Soviet War Machine: An Encyclopedia of Russian Military Equipment and Strategy” by Christopher Donnelly Dr. James E. Doran Jr. that my anxieties gradually abated.
The Soviets, I discovered, had a purely defensive posture, which rendered Sir John Hackett’s scenario implausible if not wholly ridiculous. Angry at being conned (it wasn’t to be the first nor would it be the last time) I realized that the “cold war” had been a farce from the very start and when someone (considerably later) stated, in all seriousness, that Ronald Reagan had “won the cold war” I couldn’t help but laugh. Even the Soviet “invasion” of Afghanistan, we now know, had been defensive while the creation of al Qaeda was designed to provoke a Russian “Vietnam”[1].
This doesn’t mean however that there hasn’t been a threat of war but that the threat has come largely from the West rather than the East. One shouldn’t forget that the French were training Russian officers in France to fight Russia[2], that the British and French were planning to bomb the Soviet Union (operation Pike) in 1940 and that in 1945 “Operation Unthinkable” “called for a massive Allied assault on 1 July 1945 by British, American, Polish and German…forces against the Red Army.”[3]
In the 1940s, the British killed Greek “leftists”[4], the Americans helped repress the Resistance in Greece[5] while keeping Fascists in power in Italy (see letter #120[6]). In 1945 the Americans got in contact with Nazis[7] and soon after broke all their most important agreements with the Russians[8]. While killing millions of Germans on the one hand[9] the Allies put Nazis back in power and rearmed them in Germany. Not only that: the allies created a new military organization, which was clearly modeled on the Waffen SS (NATO), and put Germans in charge of it.[10]
Behind the scenes the Allies recruited the likes of Skorzeny, who helped set up a terrorist organisation (later known as Gladio), and Gehlen, who became the head of German intelligence (BND).
In the 1950s the West encouraged both Nazis in the Ukraine[11] and the Hungarians to rebel[12] while in the 1960s the Americans deployed nuclear missiles in both Turkey and Italy, which precipitated the infamous “Cuban Missile Crisis” (I personally suspect that the Deep State wished to trigger a nuclear war as a means of population reduction and Kennedy’s failure to go along was one of the reasons they bumped him off).
The closest time however that the world came to full-on nuclear war (before now that is) was in November 1983 when: “Able Archer, which involved 40,000 US and Nato troops moving across western Europe, co-ordinated by encrypted communications systems, imagined a scenario in which Blue Forces (Nato) defended its allies after Orange Forces (Warsaw Pact countries) sent troops into Yugoslavia following political unrest. The Orange Forces had quickly followed this up with invasions of Finland, Norway and eventually Greece. As the conflict had intensified, a conventional war had escalated into one involving chemical and nuclear weapons.”
“Numerous UK air bases, including Greenham Common, Brize Norton and Mildenhall, were used in the exercise, much of which is still shrouded in secrecy. However, last month Paul Dibb, a former director of the Australian Joint Intelligence Organisation, suggested that the 1983 exercise posed a more substantial threat than the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. “Able Archer could have triggered the ultimate unintended catastrophe, and with prompt nuclear strike capacities on both the US and Soviet sides, orders of magnitude greater than in 1962,” he said.”
“The exercise took place amid heightened international tension. In September 1983 the Russians shot down a Korean Airlines Boeing 747, killing all 269 people on board, after the plane had mistakenly strayed into their airspace. There is evidence to suggest that the Russians thought the Boeing was an American spy plane.”
“Earlier in the same year the US president, Ronald Reagan, made a high-profile speech describing the Soviet Union as “the evil empire” and announced plans to build the “Star Wars” strategic defence initiative. With distrust between the US and USSR at unparalleled levels, both sides were operating on a hair trigger.”
“As Able Archer commenced, the Kremlin gave instructions for a dozen aircraft in East Germany and Poland to be fitted with nuclear weapons. In addition, around 70 SS-20 missiles were placed on heightened alert, while Soviet submarines carrying nuclear ballistic missiles were sent under the Arctic ice so that they could avoid detection.”
“Nato and its allies initially thought the Soviet response was the USSR’s own form of war-gaming. However, the classified documents obtained by the NIS reveal just how close the Russians came to treating the exercise as the prelude for a nuclear strike against them.”[13]
Given this reality it’s hard to accept Lord Ismay’s assessment that NATO’s purpose was to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. More to the point was de Gaulle’s observation, which was harsh but true:
“NATO is an academy of empty words. It is an organization that weakens our defense capabilities, instills the idea that defense is inconceivable without it, thus numbing our sense of national independence. NATO is in fact a deception, a camouflage for the US takeover Europe”.
“The landings on June 6 were an Anglo-Saxon affair from which France was excluded. They were determined to settle in France, which they saw as enemy territory! Just as they had done in Italy and were going to do in Germany! They had prepared the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories, which would rule France as their armies marched forward. They had printed counterfeit money. They would have behaved as if they were in a conquered country. And now you want me to commemorate their landings.”
De Gaulle considered the US as “an occupying state interfering in all economic, military and political processes in the world”.[14]
In 1994 Frederick Bonnart wrote: “The urgent demands from Central European and Baltic countries for admission to NATO are understandable. However, they are not under threat, and there is no sense in committing NATO to security guarantees against currently nonexistent dangers.”[15]
Three years later, Heinz Gartner, writing in The New York Times opined: “Mr. Bonnart mentions Austria as a likely NATO candidate, together with Slovenia and Romania, in 1999. But Austria has not yet made up its mind. It is not so sure that Austria will join.”
“Why should it? There is no threat to Austria’s security. Austria does not need security guarantees. It can and will participate in the new crisis-management tasks of NATO in the frame-work of the enhanced Partner-ship for Peace. It has excellent experience in peacekeeping operations. Austria does not have a problem with taking part in these operations if they are authorized by the UN Security Council.”[16]
As we now know it was the NATO expansion eastwards and especially into the Ukraine, which provoked the current war there. The decision of Finland to join NATO[17], despite its unhappy experiences in WWII, can only be described as one of complete and utter folly and one which moves us ever closer to nuclear war.
Sadly, if there is a Third World War we’ll both be, inevitably and tragically, directly affected.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/4/23/afghanistan-the-soviet-unions-vietnam
[2] p.38 Krämer des Krieges, Kai Moltke
[3] https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/operation-unthinkable-churchill-s-plans-to-invade-the-soviet-union/#:~:text=The%20plan%20called%20for%20a,his%20domination%20of%20East%20Europe.
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/30/athens-1944-britains-dirty-secret
[5] The Polk Conspiracy: Murder and Cover-Up in the Case of CBS News Correspondent George Polk, Kati Marton
[7] The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, David Talbot
[8] Krämer des Krieges, Kai Moltke
[9] Der Geplante Tod, James Bacque
[10] e.g. Adolf Heusinger, Hans Speidel, Johannes Steinhoff, Johann Graf von Kielmansegg, Ernst Ferber, Karl Schnell, Franz-Joseph Schulze & Ferdinand Maria von Senger und Etterlin
[12] https://www.anneapplebaum.com/2006/09/17/what-really-destroyed-the-hungarians-in-1956/
[13] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/02/nato-war-game-nuclear-disaster
[14] https://uwidata.com/26237-charles-de-gaulle-on-the-us-nato-and-the-dollar/
[15] https://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/11/opinion/IHT-give-nato-realistic-tasks-and-dont-enlarge-it.html
[16] https://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/21/opinion/IHT-austria-and-nato-letters-to-the-editor.html
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