Crisis Update: Oppenheimer Film Pulls Focus On Nuclear Annihilation

Mutually Assured Destruction makes a belated come back

Jul 21, 2023

Sustainable development meets the atomic bomb
The ultimate mental mastication to gum up the mind
‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’

Jul 21, 2023

The latest film to take the measure of the zeitgeist is the just-released Oppenheimer, which tells the story of the German-American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in developing the atomic bomb.

With talk that the war in Ukraine could escalate into nuclear war, the film could not be more prescient — or suspect.

Until NATO and the Ukraine were pitted against Russia (and its allies) we had heard nothing for decades about nuclear brinkmanship. We now have an economic transformation underway, effectively the decline of liberal capitalism (see upcoming article) and, in the simplest words, the wealthy elite desperate to hold onto its wealth by any means.

If you think that an exaggeration, look back just over a century: very few understood that at their apparent peak, the British and European empires were already walking dead. The answer was to reshape the world through war — which is simply a reallocation of resources.

How strange the disappearance of the nuclear war information campaigns that had loomed so large in our childhood. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction had escalated from drills in which 1950s schoolchildren sheltered under desks, in a strange premonition of the active-shooter drills to come… to the UK’s 1970s public infomercials branded Protect & Survive.

At the time the most prominent campaign, the forerunner of the environmental protests, was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or CND. Alongside stood the independent documentary makers, the most influential of whom was Peter Watkins, whose The War Game (1965) was suppressed at the time by the BBC and the UK government.

These two poles betrayed two very different agendas. One, a concern about the danger of nuclear weapons or hair-trigger miscalculations. The other, the governments’ assurance that only the acquisition of more weapons and the threat of mutual annihilation could ensure peace.

Spoiler: the reason for the timing of the UK government’s Protect & Survive public information campaign is that the government was planning to buy the Polaris submarine-based nuclear weapons system (1968 to 1996). It knew that public protest would follow, since CND had broad support, and this would culminate in 1988 when protestors broke into the control room of one of the nuclear-armed submarines at Faslane naval base. [1]

In 2021, the Biden administration exonerated Oppenheimer, posthumously reinstating his security clearance after 70 years, half a century after his death. Soon comes a movie about Oppenheimer, polishing his image as “the father of the atomic bomb.”

One other point of reference may be the Netflix series Strange Angel (2018-19) about the life of Jack Parsons, founder of JPL, precursor of NASA, and adept of Aleister Crowley.

Mental jive

You have to do a mental jive to appreciate the timing. Such agility is beyond most of the alt media, because it has what it fancies is an ironic stentorian guffaw that defends it against ideas that might breach the city walls, or because the walls have already been breached by the Trojan horse.

What is the significance of such timing, and how can it conceivably not have anything to do with the resurgence of conflict?

In 2022, George Soros delivered his annual food-and-lecture at the World Economic Forum. Twice he warned, “Our civilization may not survive.”

As Quartz — one of the constellation of latter-day alphabet outlets, along with Vox and Vice, that cannot be proven to be controlled by the intelligence services but are perhaps more aligned than most — noted, “In 2020, Soros had spotted small, hopeful shoots of popular rebellion against tyranny. This year, as his guests ate chicken and polenta, Soros could only pick out Western aid to Ukraine and the resistance of Ukrainians as silver linings.”

Soros as populist rebel is a canard that only that an inept can swallow. He is said by the state corporate media to be “the man who broke the Bank of England” in 1992. See previous Moneycircus articles for the “breaking” to be an act of Rothschild.

The youth, or those under 40, is being convinced that a one-world government would end all war. So they should question how this fits with the threat of Armageddon.

Resurgent annihilation

From Mutually Assured Destruction And The Environmental Agenda: Threat of nuclear annihilation makes a timely reappearance (Moneycircus, Feb 13, 2023)

Eurasia note #70 - Mutually Assured Destruction And The Environmental Agenda

Moneycircus

February 13, 2023

Eurasia note #70 - Mutually Assured Destruction And The Environmental Agenda

Why was civil defence so dominant for one generation and why did it go underground? If mutually-assured destruction kept peace, when was it deemed no longer necessary? The fading of MAD signaled not the end of superpower rivalry but its re-emergence.

Read full story

There is a part of the culture of the 1970s that has been absent for many decades — until recent months. The impact of nuclear war information campaigns loomed large in the world of a teenager, as the folk memory of World War Two gave way as the 1970s progressed, to the Cold War.

Those whose school days embraced long hot summers (at least in the UK) recall “protect and survive,” a civil defence programme that ran for six years from 1974.

It is not the government leaflets nor the laughable advice to hide under your desk that survives in the memory. It is not the shifting hands of the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Rather it is the documentary films of those days, that burned the threat of carbonized annihilation into our minds.

The most powerful was Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1965). Although suppressed at the time by the BBC and the UK government, it is prescient on many counts.

In one scene, set in the south-eastern English coastal county of Kent, people are told that the time from warning to impact might be little more than two minutes.

In this scenario, the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons are vulnerable to destruction thus imposing the logic to launch them in the early stages of a confrontation.

Schools no longer teach students about nuclear war, neither through public service films nor documentaries. Hollywood and made-for-television series are obsessed with contagion and zombies.

Choose your poison

Deadly viruses, especially the man-made, escaped from lab variety, have long been a staple of cultural programming. Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal from 1957 is a class above modern narrative, pushing the Black Death of the 1300s into the background of a Faustian battle with archetypal forces.

It is a rather more elegant commentary on the failings of modern life than that satire on consumerism, Dawn Of The Dead (1978).

Others are more obvious cultural programming like 12 Monkeys (1995) in which the protagonist time-travels from 2030 to the 1990s to discover the origins of a man-made virus that killed billions of human beings.

When not snorting hits of dopamine from TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram, the younger half of the population is genned up on the supposed existential threat of zombies and climate change. This may seem more tangible than aliens and asteroid impacts for the simple reason that zombies are our dark mirror: the zombie is the lifeless body reanimated without the soul; the threat of life in limbo that forms part of most religions and is a nightmare of sleepless night even to the adamant atheist.

We must separate the two: zombies are a perennial, if not eternal, hardened to the frost or lava of a restless climate. If we might save our soul from the damnation of a zombie, we are as ants in the face of the climate. Yet with which do we contend: why, we’ll take on the climate, silly! Like Icarus, who should you choose to defy if not the Sun?

The threat of nuclear war is something that we humans can contest. Instead we bury the narrative and presume to control with a fine dial that which we barely comprehend, and by which we are outclassed — we choose to duel with giants.

Ellipsis

Prof Steven Starr points out that table top war exercises always escalated into nuclear war. Today, the decision-space is more narrow than ever: hypersonic missiles travel at mach 9, which is 112 miles per minute, and Washington DC is less than 100 miles from the Atlantic coast.

In the case of a submarine or frigate-launched missile, detecting the launch, reporting to command, presidential approval and launch of Minute Men cannot happen in less than five or six minutes. “That creates the pressure to have a pre-emptive strike… use it or lose it,” Starr told Geopolitics and Empire podcast. [2]

The public is shielded from unexpected consequences and accidents. Since 1985 the U.S. has withheld information about false alarms and near misses. In that year NORAD accidentally broadcast a training video on the main screens showing an incoming ballistic missile attack.

We were told in the 1970s and 80s that nuclear weapons guaranteed peace. The theory of mutually assured destruction (MAD) meant it was in no-one’s interest to launch a mass ballistic attack on another superpower.

Threads

Two decades after The War Game the BBC, in 1984, broadcast Threads, a documentary series about effect a nuclear attack would have on civilian life, focusing on the British industrial city of Sheffield.

What took the BBC so long, one might ask: domestic politics and the growing force of environmental studies; the establishment’s need to undermine anti-nuclear protesters, while acknowledging studies of the impact of a nuclear winter in the early 1980s.

The astrophysicist Carl Sagan warned that smoke and particulates following a nuclear explosion could obstruct the sun, causing greater loss of life than the initial blast and radioactive fallout which would “kill ‘only’ hundreds of millions of people.”

Today environmentalists tout the advantage of obstructing the sun. Transhumanists have little time for humanity as most people know it. Is it a stretch to conjecture that some might see nuclear obliteration eliding with their aims?

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was a growing force in British politics, and a powerful bed of support for then leader of the UK Labour Party (1980-83), Michael Foot. The British establishment was fiercely opposed to Foot.

Although Labour was to lose the 1983 general election (with its lowest share of the vote since 1918, and its fewest MPs since 1945) the party had just two years earlier been riding high in the opinion polls against prime minister Margaret Thatcher. In Greater London Ken Livingstone had led a massively popular revolt against the Poll Tax and the privatisation of public services.

British and U.S. intelligence had been in a state of high paranoia since Harold Wilson had become Labour leader prime minister in 1964-70 and again 1974-76. There was talk from all sides of the political spectrum of spies ready to stage a coup against Wilson. [3]

Having sidelined CND, the British establishment took ownership of the narrative, though the climactic devastation would soon be overwhelmed by the environmental movement. Indeed, warnings of nuclear winter were soon dismissed as the modelling of “scientific Cassandras.” [4]

Fifteen years after MAD disappeared and CND faded from the public screens, the growing field of climate studies has reanimated the discussion of the consequences of smoke from nuclear firestorms flowing high into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun for longer than initially modelled.

A report by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War suggested a decade ago that two billion people could face “nuclear famine,” but there has been little further research into the collapse of public heath systems, clean water supply, the impact of radiation on cancers and the ecosystem, plants and animals, or the impact on a digital society of electromagnetic pulse.

No mistake

You might think that the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989-1991 removed the threat of war. According to declassified U.S. documents American officials gave repeated assurances that NATO would not expand to the east. [5]

And so the eight and final leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who died just recently in Aug 2022, agreed to abandon the Warsaw Pact, the military alliance of Eastern Europe.

The actions, rather than words, of Western leaders tells a different story.

In 2002 the U.S. withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in place since 1972, citing the need to counter a growing nuclear threat from Iran. The ABM treaty was intended to reduce the incentive to build offensive missiles, by agreeing to limit defensive batteries. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, proposal (though it never came to fruition) helped undermine the ABM treaty.

In 2019 the U.S. pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty governing land-based missiles. The pretext was Russian non-compliance but the U.S. also claimed the need to build up its weaponry against China, which was not a signatory to the treaty.

The same year the U.S. abrogated the 2002 Open Skies Treaty which provided for mutual aerial oversight of weaponry.

Russia’s response at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 led to the development of hypersonic missiles.

Western government wished to avoid a narrative that contradicted their actions. The U.S. was determined to pull out of threat reduction treaties that had helped secure an end to the Cold War. The pretext was the emergence as powers of China and Iran.

The Pentagon was to use the pretext of September 11^th, 2001, to launch seven wars, according to retired U.S. general Wesley Clark: “beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran.”

So the omerta on public discussion of mutually assured destruction coincided not with the end of superpower rivalry but its re-emergence. One is tempted to wonder: does the establishment only talk about mutually assured destruction when it discounts the threat — and when it feels the threat real, takes refuge in its negation?

Magical thinking

In the eyes of neoconservatives, MAD had not so prevented great power conflict but frozen it. By preventing the “rolling back of the power and influence of a dangerously expansionist and totalitarian Soviet Union” it prolongued the life of “an evil empire.” [6]

Now the state media gives prominence to voices that openly discuss winning a nuclear war.

“What we see today is magical thinking in so many areas, whether it is military or economic policy,” says Prof Steven Starr.

Consider a contrary view. Chinese newspaper Global Times observes that the U.S. is a country out of time — not in the sense of a stopwatch but an era. [7]

The unwritten takeaway is that the U.S. is trapped in the commodity economy of its origin, “the system design at the initial stage of its founding was based on an agricultural society. Now that the world has already entered the information era beyond the industrial age, this institutional system must undergo major changes.”

This makes for a cogent argument. The U.S. economy rose to pre-eminence under farming and the extractive industries like oil and its system is built around them. This is the territory of its dominant families: the oiler-bankers, the Rockefellers and Rothschilds; the old European royal families, their financier enablers and their aristocratic hangers on.

China, in contrast, was forced to wait for historical and technological developments to unleash the potential where, “Even countries that are lacking in natural resources have achieved development by investing in and tapping human resources.”

The Anglo-American West responded by inverting the meaning of free trade, of a rules-based international order, to mean only that which serves the oiler-bankers is worth of the name. Even their precious usury has been turned from a source of credit for growth into an extractive industry whereby successive booms and busts are required for the banker-croupier to sweep the collateral from wreckage of lost fortunes into his apron.

The Anglo-American oiler-bankers are locked in the mindset of their origins, that of commodity resource piracy, not to mention human slaving.

To such a mindset, who is not disposable?