What’s Threatening World War, and What Can Stop It

EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR MONDAY OCTOBER 16, 2023

Oct. 15, 2023 (EIRNS)—The expanding BRICS grouping includes five important nations in the Middle East-North Africa region, including three of the world’s largest fossil fuel producers—Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—and Egypt and Ethiopia. Now, among these nations the core of technology transfer worldwide is developing—for nuclear energy, fast transport, space technologies—with the creation of productive credit led by China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The future development of the world economy is there, if the United States and European nations would join it.

In the very midst of this region, war has been unleashed between Israel’s armed forces and Palestinian Hamas, which has every potential to spread. BRICS nations China and Brazil have begun organizing for an international peace conference to stop the wars both in Southwest Asia and in Europe, and to use credit for development in doing so.

Schiller Institute founder and head Helga Zepp-LaRouche, organizing worldwide support for such peace initiatives, warned on Oct. 11: “The danger now is that a very bloody conflict will play out with the potential of going beyond the region, leading to world war—because if it involves Iran, I think we are off the charts.”

But the United States has sent into the crisis an aircraft carrier strike group and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. What are Blinken—working Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, Türkiye—and other top U.S. security and military officials telling these governments and the governments of Iran and Syria?

The Biden Administration’s word to the media has been that it is warning the region (in particular, Iran and Syria) not to widen the war. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan spoke on Sunday morning of “secret communication” passed to Iran.

But based on all U.S. military history since 1944-45, it is dangerously possible that this secret communication is conveying a threat to attack Iran and/or Syria with “all military means” (i.e., including tactical nuclear weapons) if those countries enter the war against the Israeli Defense Forces or back Lebanese Hezbollah in doing so.

The United States Executive Branch has—usually secretly—conveyed such threats of first use of nuclear weapons, against other nuclear powers and/or non-nuclear powers, in more than 25 different military crises since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Continuously since the development of nuclear weapons, American Presidents have made specific threats to use nuclear weapons first: from Truman’s actual use of atomic bombs in 1945 to threaten Russia; to his 1950 public statement, “There has always been active consideration of its use” in Korea; to George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s nuclear threats conveyed to Iran in 2006; to Donald Trump’s highly public threats in 2018 to destroy North Korea with nuclear weapons.

The entire 75-year U.S. military history is documented in the late Daniel Ellsberg’s harrowing 2017 book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. The Israel-Hamas war resembles 25-30 war crises since 1945 in which the United States Executive has used, publicly implied, and/or secretly threatened the first use of nuclear weapons against nuclear and non-nuclear powers alike, to pre-empt actions of “adversaries.”

President Joe Biden’s claim that he intended to change U.S. nuclear weapons policy to deterrent use only, has simply been dropped since he took office. And now, the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States has issued a report calling for building up a nuclear weapons and delivery capability to fight nuclear war against both Russia and China. The report threatens Russia and China with nuclear war under the thin guise of claiming they will somehow provoke it.

Again, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned, the danger is “world war—because if it involves Iran, I think we are off the charts.”

The vast majority of Americans, and most others in nations around the world, have rarely been aware of the threats for “pre-emptive” nuclear bombing which American executive and military officials were making. The Congressional Commission report warns us: We are now responsible to act to stop this tragedy from becoming world war. The expanding group of BRICS nations, in the midst of which this war has been detonated, are our allies in this, as they are taking that responsibility—both for peace, and for funding real, physical-economic development.