On the Eighty-first Anniversary of Extinction’s Promise
Eighty-one years ago the first Atomic bombs were used. We, the descendants of that generation are as helpless as they were to stop the insane promise of automatic extinction
[ Note: this is an unfinished essay of mine from 2025. I think it’s as good as any I wrote to pay homage to the 81st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fact that this essay is still current after a year of war that now extends over Europe and West Asia and now involves Russia, China, Iran, Europe, Israel and the USA is as ominous as anything in it. ]
“We” is an American word. It comes from the American Declaration of Independence and then from the Constitution. “We the People of the United States of America”. It was a declaration of integrity of mind and purpose which has become an inescapable linguistic trap.
A little old man like me is included in “We”. I don’t get a vote on that and neither do you.
“We” – this completely undefined entity – is now even changing the climate of earth for the worse by exhaling CO2, if “we” are to believe “the science” that makes media noise at the mere behest of corporate profiteers. What calls itself “We” is also deciding, quite rationally so say the pundits, to burn up this whole global shebang in a thermonuclear holocaust.
“We” is powerful. And yet “we” are powerless.
Iranian-Brazilian YouTube creator Nima Alkhorshid [“Dialogue Works” check it out!] interviewed American Professor Ted Postal recently, asking if the huge explosion of an ammo dump near Tartus in Syria was a small “tactical nuclear weapon”, as many on social media suspect.
<< Nima Alkhorshid interviews Professor Ted Postal on YouTube: Assessing Explosion in Syria, Was it a Nuclear Bomb? >>
Short answer? No. You can tell just by looking closely at the pictures of the blast.
A real nuclear bomb is not merely a larger conventional bomb. Its effects are quite different. It can only be compared to the WWII fire bombing of Dresden or Tokyo by masses of fire-starting bombs which were dropped simultaneously in a ring-shaped pattern on these cities. The “conventional” bombs were so numerous that they created a firestorm.
A firestorm occurs when a city burns all at once. The separate fires are so many and so close that they join into one fire which then draws cool air inward at hurricane force – 100-plus miles per hour – creating a fire tornado miles in diameter. If you survive the blast wave and are still conscious and able to move – perhaps on the periphery a few miles from ground zero, – Ted Postal advises that you must get out of your basement shelter and “Walk against the wind”. But do it quickly because when the firestorm peaks that hurricane-force wind will sweep everything and everybody into the fiery maelstrom. The soot from your former home and former body will be convected up to stratospheric heights.
Tokyo was turned into a firestorm in the spring of 1945 by the use of hundreds of US B-29 bombers which dropped fire-starter bombs in a ring-shaped pattern which contained all of central Tokyo. At least 200,000 people were incinerated alive. Mere weeks later a far more efficient firestorm-starter was exploded over Hiroshima and then an even larger A-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
The data collected from these demonstrations is the only real evidence we have to show us what will foreclose the future of human evolution on what was once this habitable blue-green Earth.
We? Who is this “we”? We are the inhabitants of this, the last and most technologically advanced and comprehensive global civilization within the written memory of scholarship. We – all of us now living from infants to elders – are quite possibly the last extant human generations.
By the early 1950s the A-bomb was already obsolete, replaced by the “Hydrogen”, thermonuclear bomb of magnitudes greater destructive power, deliverable by bombers and soon by unstoppable rockets of intercontinental range.
If a few thermonuclear warheads are scattered over New York City and New Jersey the urban conurbation will become one firestorm hundreds of miles in diameter. If there is ever a nuclear war between Russia and the USA the hypersonic Russian warheads will pass the American nuclear warheads in near space and the hundreds of miles wide firestorm centred on the urban conurbation around New York City will be burning at the same time as the Los Angeles conurbation and the Chicago and Atlanta and Seattle and every conurbation in a huge U-shaped fire storm from the Atlantic coast down through the Caribbean coast and up through the Pacific coast. Simultaneously, dead America will have sent warheads to burn all the urban conurbations of Russia.
The radioactive soot from these colossal fires will reach the stratosphere and join the world-around jet streams and spread to block or at least dim the sunlight all over the world. This will last for months at least or even several years. The global temperature will drop by tens of degrees, dooming whatever survivors may still be alive on at least the large land masses of the northern hemisphere.
The years-long global winter will make raising food crops impossible where once the food for 8 billion humans was raised. What food might possibly be produced by whatever survivors in equatorial regions will not be distributed because the world’s civilizations will be dead along with their populations.
This is why in the mid 1980s (as I personally recall reading) the United States Pentagon announced that according to its best and latest study, in the case of a full exchange of thermonuclear warheads between the USA and USSR “the extinction of human beings cannot be ruled out as a possibility”. Today nuclear weapons are far more widely distributed. Eurasia is as thoroughly supplied with targets as is North America.
China will not be spared. Dying fingers and artificially “intelligent” automatic systems will see to that. Will New Delhi join Seoul and Beijing and Shanghai and Moscow and New York City and Los Angeles and London and Paris? Once begun, how could the automatic extinction machine be turned off. There won’t be any living human intelligence to cry “Hold, hold!”
In Washington DC today people are talking about “survivable nuclear war”.
I begin to wonder if the current popularization of pictures of mass mutilation in Gaza is functioning to desensitize American voters to horrors so that war with Russia will be more acceptable.
Who or what could possibly be in charge in DC?
Col Larry Wilkerson is a teacher of US and world military history of decades experience. He says he once believed that Israel was in charge of what he calls the American Empire, but now he has reversed that estimation. He believes that “We” are just using Israel to create a ring of chaos and death around Russia and around China too.
See: “Col. Larry Wilkerson: Israel’s Path to Self-Destruction: A Nation at Crossroads - YouTube”
By “we” Col Wilkerson hastens to say he does not mean the American people. He means “the Deep State”, centrally controlled by the central banks of the American Empire, the Empire of the Atlantic West.
“We” are doing all the evil, all the destruction of nations, all the genocides in Gaza and in the West Bank in Palestine. “We” are driving the last remaining biologically fertile Ukrainians, from 18 to 25, to their miserable doom on the receding eastern front of soon-to-be-extinct Ukraine.
“We”, the American Empire, desperate to destroy and colonize and enslave Russia and China and the whole world. “We” are in charge of this murder-suicide.
Col Wilkerson was sure that the Israeli Lobby, AIPAC was manipulating Congress and the US military, but recently he reversed this opinion. What was it that changed Col Wikerson’s mind? He found out that Israel is not just armed by Americans its Air Force is fuelled by Americans. So every murdered baby in Gaza is being ripped apart because the American Empire wants it that way.
The JPA fuel for Israeli bombers is supplied by Exxon-Mobile using a secret fleet of tankers who illegally turn off their transponders to hide their activities. This is the “secret fleet” of the American Empire.
But I have a question:
When I say “we” I mean to reference a group of which I am personally a member. Does Col Larry Wilkerson include himself in the American Empire and its “Deep State”? He doesn’t include the American people, he says, and few other retired American army officers are as hateful as he is toward the reckless American imperialism from Israel to Taiwan.
But “we” are in charge of this global suicide?
And “we” are using a secret fleet of covert tankers to fuel the bombers to mass-murder women and children in Gaza and Lebanon.
“We” have decided this, planned it, ordered it. “We” somewhere, somehow, are in our right mind, one mind, one rational, planning, authoritative mind? Evil and wrong and suicidal, but ONE mind?
The rest of the world, the bystander population of all the earth, doesn’t have any other American-English word to call itself except “we”.
This reminds me of the too little known fact that at least up to December 7,1941 when Imperial Japanese Aircraft Carriers attacked and sank most of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, John Davison Rockefeller’s Standard Oil tankers were secretly fuelling the German submarine wolf packs that almost won the Battle of the Atlantic by sinking US and Canadian merchant ships supplying Britain. If anybody in political or even military authority in Washington DC were aware of that they were few and little heeded.
Washington was “in charge” of America. But who was Washington. We the People. We the Democrats? We the War Department?
The American military and political leadership were lost in wishful delusions. They were desperate to avoid a two front naval war with Germany in the Atlantic and Japan in the Pacific. So they fooled themselves that the Japanese were weak and incapable and Oahu was invulnerable especially when the US Pacific Fleet was at anchor in Pearl Harbor.
Thus it was that the American Empire was compromised by self-flattering delusion in 1941. In 1941 America was economically strong and so delusion in Washington was not fatal.
Now? Take a look at what is imagining itself to be in power:
Chris Bray of Los Angeles [“Tell Me How This Ends” on Substack] recently reported on a conference which took place at the Naval War College of the United States.
<< Chris Bray: 2025 Forecast: Reality Approaches>>
Chris Bray references the official video of this conference:
<< 2024 WPS Symposium: Elective Panel 1A - Strengthening Maritime Security>>
At the 5:28 mark the panelists projected a slide outlining the major threat faced by the US Navy:
“Key Intersections of Gender and Climate Security … Exacerbated Gender Inequalities … Increased Gender-Based Violence”
The panelists later projected a slide titled:
“3 Triple Nexus Challenges in Military (Maritime (Maritime Security) [sic – I kid you not] Implementation”…
“Challenge # 1 Insufficient Gender Experts”
This is the United States Naval War College? These two screen captures are precious artifacts. I had a fantasy wish: I wanted to show up in the audience dressed in a Victorian frock and a tall top hat with even taller white rabbit ears. “Excuse me,” I’d say, “Can somebody direct me to the Naval War College of the United States of America? I thought this was it but obviously I’m still in Wonderland.”
In 2017, in two incidents months apart, two different US Navy destroyers were T-boned by slow freighters in the South China Sea because – according to the official USN investigation – the officers did not know enough basic seamanship to properly calibrate their own radars.
Recently the Houthis of Yemen, who according to the highest wisdom in Washington are a ragtag bunch of clowns in PJ’s and flipflops, have been firing drones and missiles which have basically chased USN carrier groups out of range and effectively blockaded the Red Sea to any freighters headed for Israel and bankrupted Israel’s Red Sea port. In the convulsive effort to bomb the Houthis into submission the USN carrier group so tasked has managed to shoot down one of its own F-18s and almost shoot down another one because their newly upgraded IFF capabilities are for shit. Or maybe the officers don’t know how to do their job?
I could go on and so could a lot more knowledgeable people including you. What or who is really in charge of the US military?
Who, for instance, decided to blow up Nord Stream? Certainly US Navy ships were utilized during BALTOPS 22, since nobody else could possibly have had the technology and no other navy could have mounted such an operation when the area was crowded with US and NATO ships. I downloaded the details on the whereabouts of US Navy ships involved in BALTOPS 22 and also afterwards in September – named specifically were USS Kearsarge and its support group. I got all this information legally from the US Navy website.
That act of terrorism has sent Germany and Europe spiralling down in a death dive because without Russian gas their industry is fatally starved for energy. Meanwhile neocons in Washington are demanding that Europe step up its industrial war production to aid Ukraine.
Who is in charge of the US Navy? Seymour Hersh thinks Joe Biden and Jake Sullivan. I think it’s the CIA. Who is in charge of the CIA, just considering the sanity of blowing up Nord Stream from the standpoint of military industrial capability in the contest against Russia? Do the decisions stand the test of sanity. How is it that the American Empire (overt or covert, it’s the same!) seems almost exactly as non compos mentis as Joe Biden?
And Donald Trump says he wants to take Canada and Greenland and nobody can tell if he’s kidding. He’s president elect and he says stuff like this?
Considering the issue of sanity, one can’t distinguish the US Naval War College from the court of the Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Wonderland. These people are in charge of nuclear weapons!
Professor Ted Postal thinks Tulsi Gabbard – ALONE among Trump’s appointees and all of his friends and enemies in DC – understands that nuclear war would extinct humanity. That seems like a terribly thin margin of safety and sanity to me.