Dr. Strangelove Returns From The Dead

Vladimir Putin on Thursday threatened global nuclear war if the West followed through on hints by French president Macron that NATO was contemplating sending troops to Ukraine.

Putin made those comments in his annual “state of the nation” address. Less than 24-hours later, he followed up by test-firing a solid-fuel Yars ICBM, which NATO dubs the SS-29.

The Yars, like its newer cousin, the liquid-fueled Sarmat (Satan-2), can carry nuclear-armed hypersonic glide vehicles that fly at speeds up to Mach 25 and that can defeat any missile defense systems currently deployed or under development. Both missiles, and a variety of hypersonic re-entry vehicles, are part of a $650 billion upgrade to Russia’s nuclear arsenal Putin announced more a decade ago.

As for Macron (or Little Cookie, as I call him in my latest book, Raising Olives in Provence), made his careless comments at a NATO summit in Paris on Monday.

But the one who really let the cat out of the bag was German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who told the group that Germany was not going to send its Taurus long range cruise missiles to Ukraine because it would require German military personnel on the ground.

Taurus “is a very long-range weapon,” he said, “and what was done on the part of the British and French in terms of target-control and target-control assistance can’t be done in Germany.” That prompted British lawmaker Tobias Elwood to tell London’s Daily Telegraph that Scholz had committed “a flagrant abuse of intelligence.”

That is undoubtedly true. Both comments were picked up by the online service of Russia Today (or RT, as it’s now called), Putin’s megaphone to the West.

The deployment to Ukraine of NATO weaponry that can reach deep into Russia has long been a red line for Putin. “They should eventually realize that we also have weapons that can hit targets on their territory,” he said on Thursday. “Everything that the West comes up with creates the real threat of a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons, and thus the destruction of civilization,” he added.

And if the threat of global nuclear war from Russia wasn’t enough, also on Thursday the commander of U.S. Space Force, General Stephen Whiting, told Congress that China has expanded its military capabilities in space at a “breathtaking pace,” with some 359 satellites currently in orbit, three times the number aloft in 2018.

Whiting testified that some of China’s satellites “could function as weapons that can disrupt” U.S. satellites. Like Russia, China was developing hypersonic glide vehicles capable of defeating U.S. missile defenses.

You could call this week’s events a throwback to the era of Dr. Strangelove, except that they involved real leaders, not Hollywood fictions.

©2024. Kenneth R. Timmerman. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Western Islamists Work to Build the Taliban’s Afghanistan into a Global Caliphate

I discuss this and developments in Iran and Israel on this week’s Prophecy Today Weekend. As always, you can listen live on Saturday at 1 PM on 104.9 FM or 550 AM, or by using the Jacksonville Way Radio app. And if you miss it, you can download the podcast here.

---