Nukes, Drones & Bonds

Musings on the cost & duration of war

• Cash-strapped powers looking at cheaper & longer wars

• Attack on Russia's nuclear capability repudiates MAD & defies treaties

• Is the plan to evolve war from quick annihilation to decades-long attrition?

• An empire will struggle to fight if it can't raise finance from bond markets

• JP Morgan's Dimon warns of looming bond market 'panic'

• Is a money power desperate to'reset', willing to do so by any means necessary?

(2,000 words or about 10 minutes of your company)

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Fabians, Milner Group And War - Britain commits to Ukraine, cuts pensions, announces austerity (Jul 29, 2024)
Eurasia note #70 - Mutually Assured Destruction & Environmental Agenda - Threat of nuclear annihilation makes a timely reappearance (Feb 13, 2023)
Oppenheimer Film Pulls Focus On Nuclear Annihilation - Mutually Assured Destruction makes a belated come back (Jul 21, 2023)
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Belaya airfield, Irkutsk, before and after the Ukrainian drone attack

Jun 4, 2025

Does Ukraine's attack on Russia's nuclear deterrent mean NATO is risking Mutually Assured Destruction?

Or will sudden death be swapped for attrition by drone, over decades, as decribed by George Orwell and H.G Wells?

The good news is that the cost of conventional war may give Western governments pause. The bad news is that drones make war cheaper.

Drone swarms are the future, according to Britain's Strategic Defence Review (SDR), whose publication was timed with just such an attack on Russian air bases.

Back to 1900s

For decades the concept of Mutually-Assured Destruction (MAD) was credited with keeping the peace. The risk of annihilation was such that no country challenged the other's nuclear capability.

In military terms Russia’s bombers may be a fair target. The issue is escalation in the context of nuclear doctrine.

The attack on Russian air bases and the destruction of long-range bombers is an assault not just on the doctrine that NATO sold us throughout the Cold War, that nukes kept us safe. By breaking nuclear arms control treaties, it comes close to a declaration of war.

The provocation comes as the last bilateral arms control treaty between the United States and Russia, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), is scheduled to expire on February 5, 2026. The U.S. withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019.

Possible objectives

Far from "making us safer" drones present the prospect of unwinnable war. Combined with a cyber and electromagnetic "Kill Net", war could grind on for decades, countries degrading each other.

George Orwell is perhaps best known for the forever war but it was prefigured by H.G. Wells in Things to Come (book 1933 and film, Korda, 1936) in which war continues for two decades until the populace, bombed back into the stone age, thinned by plague, no longer recalls why war began.

The Fabian H.G. Wells could have added: "Now, that's what I call a great reset."

Rapid urbanisation in the late 1800s presented a threat of class warfare to the wealthy, Wells wrote at the time, while a large part of society would resist the direction in which the elite planned to modernize. The spur to compliance was provided by war.

Readers will know this is the same language used by the Carnegie foundation in 1908.

Long before WWI, Wells envisaged a “mercenary enterprise” that would be blamed for the disasters of war, and that would result in a "World State."

See Fabians, Milner Group And War - Britain commits to Ukraine, cuts pensions, announces austerity (Jul 29, 2024)

Could it be that the Cold War doctrine of MAD and the potential of sudden annihilation, is replaced with the objective of a long war of attrition. This after all was the reason for extending World Wars One and Two.

See Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, Gerry Docherty and James Macgregor.)

Sadly, Gerry Docherty died last year, but his collaborator James Macgregor has written a new book, Two World Wars and Hitler: Who was Responsible?: Anglo-American Money, Foreign Agents and Geopolitics. [1]

See, for more on MAD, Eurasia note #70 - Mutually Assured Destruction & Environmental Agenda - Threat of nuclear annihilation makes a timely reappearance (Feb 13, 2023)

Oppenheimer Film Pulls Focus On Nuclear Annihilation - Mutually Assured Destruction makes a belated come back (Jul 21, 2023)

Why take such risks?

A number of issues coincide. Many Western leaders have approval ratings in the teens or low 20s as they push through the Great Reset, or whatever name you choose for the mix of policies, monetary, demographic, energy and cybernetic (technocracy) with military countermeasures unleashed upon the people, and consequences for lifestyle, food, fuel, travel, health care, pensions, welfare and the reproductive threat to their descendents.

A growing segment of the population senses that the conflicts in Europe and South-West Asia (Mid East) are related, from Ukraine and Israel to Iran.

The economist Martin Armstrong takes the view that today's conflicts are strictly geopolitical — regardless of the loyalties, religious and other, through which people tend to view them. [2]

The anti-war vote has been strong in elections across Europe. That's despite the uniform chanting for war by a state-corporate media beset by ignorance and the dead weight of military intelligence.

They may not have time for geopolitics but they don't like the drip, drip of headlines talking of conscription. They can see that politicians claim they cannot maintain public services, yet suddenly have money to build bomb factories. Europe's top cheerleader UK prime minister Keir Starmer promises billions for more submarines, nuclear warheads and munitions.

Post-war war

Germany's first chancellor Otto von Bismarck at least recognised that a state must take care of its citizens, if it expected in return their loyalty to the state (if he did not extend that to Poles). Carl von Clausewitz, writing at the pinnacle of the nation state, wrestled with the nature of war.