Peter Kuznick
speaker
151 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Peter Kuznick’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But that gets back to 1990, NATO expansion. And then in 1997, Brzezinski lays it out in his book, The Grand Chessboard, which... Feith and Libby and Hadley were also writing about just at the same time. And what Brzezinski says in the Grand Chessboard is that if you can separate Ukraine from Russia, then Russia will never be a Eurasian superpower again.
They had a strategy for doing exactly what they did for quite some time before that. This is not something that they've just thought up in 2014.
We had 185 ICBMs, and the Russians had four. Yeah, but I'm talking about in 1960 when Kennedy comes into office. Then we increase it by 1,000. And the Joint Chiefs, the Air Force wanted 10,000. Joint Chiefs wanted 3,000, I think it was. And McNamara said the lowest number we can get away with is 1,000.
But from the Soviet perspective, the United States was already ahead between 10 to 1 and 100 to 1 in every category. And now they see us adding 1,000 more ICBMs. So the Kremlin interpreted it that the U.S. was preparing for a first strike against the Soviet Union, which is part of the reason why they put the missiles into Cuba, to try to offset that, at least to some degree.
But again, you know, and Kennedy got a briefing on July 20th, 1961, about a secret advanced preemptive strike, nuclear strike to wipe out the Soviet Union.
And Kennedy walked out of that midway through the briefing. And he's turned to Dean Ruskin and said, and we call ourselves the human race.
Lemnitzer gave it, and one of the people there said, I think it was Roswell Gilpatrick, says he gave it as if he was talking to kindergartners, and Kennedy was so disgusted with it and his thinking behind the idea that we were going to have a preemptive surprise nuclear strike, unprovoked, against the Soviet Union. But there are military people who were thinking that way, as there are today.
I mean, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists had an article on August 20th. There were two interesting articles. Sanger had one in the New York Times that day saying that the United States is preparing to fight a three-front nuclear war against Russia, China, and North Korea and win that.
And the same day, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists came out with an article saying that there are still planners in the Pentagon who believe that we can win a nuclear war. and should plan for that, what would that mean to win a nuclear war? It's insanity. It doesn't mean anything. Well, that's why you should read this book.
They're gone. The Pentagon has been trying to war game limited nuclear war for decades, and it never ends up at a limited nuclear war. I mean, at what point does it stop? It always keeps going till everything's gone.
Well, Sagan came up with the idea in the early 80s. Early 80s. But if anything, and then he got attacked by the Wall Street Journal and others for bad science, which is bullshit. But the latest scientific findings are that Sagan and company actually downplayed the effects of nuclear winter.
Nuclear winter, for example, now, the latest studies show that a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan, in which 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons would be used, would push... 5 million tons of smoke, soot, and debris into the atmosphere. It would encircle the stratosphere within two weeks, block the sun's rays from getting to the Earth.
Temperatures would plummet to freezing on the Earth. Much of the agriculture would be destroyed. And a limited nuclear warp of 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons could kill up to 2 billion people. Two billion. If there was a, we don't have 100, we've got 12,000. And they're not Hiroshima size. Many of them are seven to 70 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb.
And so if there was a large scale use, it would, the cities would burn and would send up so much soot that would block the sun's rays for years. And we might not survive as a species. The likelihood is that all large life forms would probably die off. Some people might be able to get under the ground, you know, would have a mine shaft capped like a Strangelove.
yes this is very realistic yeah it could happen but now our weapons are even much bigger much bigger much worse yeah but he was he said yeah this is real although back in the 60s we're actually building bigger nuclear weapons than we are today the russians tested their 50 million megaton weapon the tsar bomba and it could have been 100 megatons if they'd wanted to underground
I'm not sure if it was an underground test.
Tucker, let me take it back just a little bit. Of course. Because in 2008... That's when the United States called for Ukraine and Georgia to enter NATO. Right. And that was clearly crossing Russia's red line. In fact, our then U.S. ambassador to Russia was William Burns, now the head of the CIA. Burns writes a secret memo back to the White House titled, Nyet Means Nyet.
don't cross Russia's red lines about Ukraine in NATO. And that's where things begin to change. Putin was furious. He actually went to the NATO meeting and had been reaching out to the US since 9-11. I mean, he was the first foreign leader to actually contact the White House and to offer assistance. And he did help us in Afghanistan originally. And then what do we do in 2002?
We abandoned the ABM Treaty. That was a horrible blow to them. Then we invade Iraq, which they were totally opposed to. And so then the relations begin to deteriorate. I was saying before about Krauthammer, in 2002, he revisits his idea of the unipolar moment. He says, I was wrong in 1990. It's not the unipolar moment. It's the unipolar era. and the U.S.
is going to dominate the world for the foreseeable future. It could be 100 years, not 30 or 40 years. And that's when the neocons started coming out of the frame. They started appearing everywhere and saying the importance of American empire, that we're going to change the chessboard. When Wesley Clark went to the Pentagon,
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