Move Hypersonic Weapons Within Striking Distance of U.S, Russian MP Says

By Gerrard Kaonga On 7/4/22 at 8:59 AM EDT

A video of a Russian politician calling for a new Cuban missile crisis over the Ukraine conflict has gone viral on social media.

Russian Duma member Andrei Gurulyov was speaking on Russian state TV and discussing the need for a resolution to the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Gurulyov said moving Russia’s hypersonic weapons within striking distance of U.S. territory would force President Joe Biden to come to the negotiating table with Russia and stop supplying Ukraine with weapons for the conflict.

The Daily Beast’s Julia Davis shared the video to her Twitter page. The video has so far been viewed over 130,000 times.

Propagandists on Russian state TV advocate creating another Cuban Missile Crisis (this time, with hypersonic missiles) in order to extract concessions out of the U.S. They also propose total destruction of Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and warn other countries: “You’re next.” pic.twitter.com/6j6D0zKIwV— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) July 3, 2022

“Propagandists on Russian state TV advocate creating another Cuban Missile Crisis (this time, with hypersonic missiles) in order to extract concessions out of the U.S.”

“They also propose total destruction of Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and warn other countries: ‘You’re next.'”

The U.S, Russia as well as China have all been racing to develop hypersonic missiles. A hypersonic missile can travel at speeds of Mach 5 or higher—five times faster than the speed of sound. On Thursday, June 30, the Pentagon announced the failure of the Common Hypersonic Glide Body (CHGB) test amid concerns that the U.S. was falling behind Russia and China in developing these types of weapons. As the war has raged on in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has repeatedly boasted about his country’s hypersonic weapons prowess.

In the clip, Gurulyov speaks in Russian but an English translation runs along the bottom of the screen. It is unclear when the footage was recorded.

“Right now, they’re delivering MLRS [Multiple Launch Rocket System], howitzers, they’ll deliver anything there[in Ukraine], up to a nuclear bomb just not to let us win,” he said, referencing Western countries’ commitment to supplying Ukraine with weapons.

“Next, they’ll send planes, anti-aircraft systems, then anti-missile systems and so on and so forth, they will not calm down.”

Gurulyov went on to describe how Russia could succeed in the “denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine.”

“Any détente happens after a good crisis, like détente that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he continued.

“Why? Because during the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was a direct threat to the territory of the U.S. to which they had no immediate response.

“We should create similar circumstances since the U.S. is behind all this and others are on their leash.

“We’re ahead of everyone with hypersonic weapons, our hypersonic weapons should be, not only aboard traditional carriers, but brought near to the vicinity of the United States.

“With a flight time of five minutes, maximum, Biden will keep sitting there and stuttering but the rest will think about how to negotiate.

“That is the only scenario for us to be able to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine.”

Gurulyov then hinted that Russia had a desire to come to the negotiating table in order to resolve the conflict.

He emphasized that in “any war, you can’t always keep winning,” and admitted that there must be defeats eventually.

However, journalist Nadana Fridriksson, who spoke after Gurulyov, hinted that Russia could invade other nations after the Ukraine conflict is concluded.

“Those countries in the post-Soviet space, that decided to play with Westernness, neutrality, they should understand that they’re next,” she said. “Sooner or later, the Ukrainian campaign will conclude, after Ukraine, another country’s turn will come.”

Newsweek has contacted the White House and Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment.

Eric ZuesseJuly 4, 2022

Published2 days ago

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the central issue was how short America’s available reaction-time to a Soviet blitz nuclear attack would be and whether it would be too short for America to respond before America’s leader, JFK, would be able to press the nuclear button and retaliate against such a Soviet nuclear first-strike (from so near a location as Cuba). That time-interval would have been about 30 minutes, and Kennedy told Khrushchev that that would be unacceptably short and so if Khrushchev would go through with his plan to place his missiles in Cuba, then America would preemptively launch our nuclear warheads against the Soviet Union. Khrushchev decided not to do it. WW III was thus averted. But now we’re potentially down to around 5 minutes, in the reverse direction, and almost nobody is even talking about it.

The present version of that threat (to the entire world) started in 2010, when U.S. President Barack Obama (who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize for his rhetoric) met privately in the White House with the then newly and democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who had just been elected by Ukrainians on a platform of continuing into the future the geostrategic neutrality of Russia’s next-door neighbor Ukraine regarding the continuing goal of the U.S. Government to conquer Russia. Yanukovych refused to assist America in that regard, but would also not oppose it; Ukraine would remain neutral. Later that same year, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met privately with Yanukovych in Kiev, and the result was the same: Ukraine would remain neutral regarding Russia and the United States. Then, in 2011, two agents of the CIA-created Google Corporation, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who happened to be personal friends and associates of Ms. Clinton (plus some of those men’s close associates), met privately with Julian Assange for a ‘friendly’ visit allegedly in order to quote him in their upcoming book, The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives how to stir up and organize a grass-roots movement online so as to enhance democracy. Only later did Assange recognize that he had divulged to them tips that were subsequently used by the U.S. State Department and CIA to organize the coup that overthrew Yanukovych in February 2014. Assange then headlined in October 2014, “Google Is Not What It Seems”. That’s when Assange noted, “Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s ‘director of regime change.’”

This coup (called ’the Maidan revolution’ or “Euromaidan”) started being organized inside the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine by no later than 1 March 2013, but Wikipedia says instead: “Euromaidan started in the night of 21 November 2013 when up to 2,000 protesters gathered at Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti and began to organize themselves with the help of social networks.” (Nothing was mentioned there about the U.S. Embassy’s having organized them.)

The U.S. Government had also engaged the Gallup polling organization, both before and after the coup, in order to poll Ukrainians, and especially ones who lived in its Crimean independent republic, regarding their views on U.S., Russia, NATO, and the EU; and, generally, Ukrainians were far more pro-Russia than pro-U.S., NATO, or EU, but this was especially the case in Crimea; so, America’s Government knew that Crimeans would be especially resistant. However, this was not really new information. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.

In other words: what Obama did was generally successful, it grabbed Ukraine, or most of it, and it changed Ukrainians’ minds regarding America and Russia. But only after the subsequent passage of time did the American neoconservative heart become successfully grafted into the Ukrainian nation so as to make Ukraine a viable place to position U.S. nuclear missiles against Moscow. Furthermore: America’s rulers also needed to do some work upon U.S. public opinion. Not until February of 2014 — the time of Obama’s coup — did more than 15% of the American public have a “very unfavorable” view of Russia. (Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, that figure had already risen to 42%. America’s press — and academia or public-policy ‘experts’ — have been very effective at managing public opinion.)

Back in 2012, when Obama was running for re-election, against Mitt Romney, that figure was still remaining at 11%, where it had been approximately ever since Gallup had started polling on this question in 1989. So, Obama, and the U.S. Congress, and the newsmedia owners who had sold all of those poliiticians to the American public, had a lot of work yet to do after Obama’s re-election in 2012. During that political contest, Obama was aware of this fact, and used it to his own advantage against the overtly hyper-anti-Russian candidate, Romney.

A major reason why the American people re-elected U.S. President Barack Obama, instead of elected a new President Romney, was Romney’s having said of Russia, on 26 March 2012,

Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe. They — they fight every cause for the world’s worst actors. … Russia is the — the geopolitical foe.

Not just “a” geopolitical foe, but “the” geopolitical foe.” (Wow! In a world with growing jihadist movements, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS?) The prior month, Gallup had polled, and reported that 11% figure; so, Romney was jumping the gun a lot on this, maybe because he was more concerned about fundraising than about appealing to voters. He knew he would need lots of money in order to have even a chance against Obama.

Obama responded to that comment mainly at the re-election campaign’s end, by springing this upon Romney during a debate, on 22 October 2012:

Governor Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that Al Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not Al Qaida; you said Russia. In the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.

Regarding the incident on 26 March 2012, when Obama spoke with Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev at the South Korean “Nuclear Security Summit”, Politifact reported:

Obama’s campaign had very successfully presented himself as NOT being like Romney (even though he secretly WAS). Lies like this had, in fact, won Obama his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. But now he won his re-election. He was an astoundingly gifted liar.

In March 2012, at a summit in South Korea, Obama was caught in a “hot mic” incident. Without realizing he could be overheard, Obama told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have more ability to negotiate with the Russians about missile defense after the November election.

“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him [the incoming President Putin] to give me space,” Obama was heard telling Medvedev, apparently referring to incoming Russian president Vladi­mir Putin.

“Yeah, I understand,” Medvedev replied.

Obama interjected, saying, “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”

So: Obama was telling Putin there, through Medvedev, that his next Administration would soften its stand on America’s installing in eastern Europe, near and even on Russia’s borders, missiles that are designed to disable Russia’s ability to retaliate against a U.S. nuclear first-strike — the U.S. ABM or anti-ballistic-missile system and the nuclear weapoons that America was designing.

Obama wasn’t lying only to America’s voters; he was shown there privately lying to Putin, by indicating to Medvedev that instead of becoming more aggressive (by his planned ABMs, and super-advanced nuclear fuses) against Russia in a second term, he’d become less aggressive (by negotiating with Putin about these matters — as you can see there, the nub of the issue was George Herbert Walker Bush’s lie to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990).

Whereas Cuba was around 30 minutes away from nuking Washington DC., Ukraine would be around 5 minutes away from nuking Moscow. No other country is that close to Moscow. This is probably the main reason why, on 24 February 2022, Putin finally decided to invade Ukraine. But even if he wins there, Finland is only 7 minutes away from Moscow. And Finland was one of the Axis powers in Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa invasion against the Soviet Union between 25 June 1941 and 19 September 1944; so, Finland’s rejoining the nazi alliance now would certainly pose an even greater danger to Russians than Cuba’s joining the Soviet alliance posed to Americans in 1962. But this time, the aggressor-nation in the matter is the U.S. and its allies, not Russia, and yet Russia is responding with far less urgency than America had done in 1962. We’re still on borrowed time, borrowed now from Russia.

To all this, a friend has replied to me:

Completely invalid analogy.  Having Russian missiles in Cuba in the early days of ICBM technology was to the USA what having USA missiles in Turkey was to Russia.  The crisis was resolved when both countries agreed to withdraw their missiles. Made sense in those days.  Today, the technology is such that proximity of launch sites to targets is irrelevant.

However, some of America’s top nuclear scientists don’t share that view, at all, but its opposite. They concluded, on 1 March 2017:

The US nuclear forces modernization program has been portrayed to the public as an effort to ensure the reliability and safety of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, rather than to enhance their military capabilities. In reality, however, that program has implemented revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing — boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three — and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.

Starting in 2006, the predominant American meta-strategy has been called “Nuclear Primacy” — meaning to attain the ability to win a nuclear war — not merely what it had previously been (M.A.D. or “Mutually Assured Destruction”): to prevent one.

Apparently, the latest fashion in U.S. Government and academic thinking, about this ‘competition’, is, first, to dismemberRussia. They even sell this goal as embodying America’s “commitment to anti-imperialism.”

Even after the lies that got us to invade Iraq, America’s public seem to have learned no lessons.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

Russia on high nuke alert as Putin launches ’round-the-clock’ monitoring at new facility

RUSSIA has placed a “round-the-clock” nuclear alert on a newly opened facility, Interfax news agency reported on Monday, citing the defence ministry.

By James Lee

 10:28, Mon, Jul 4, 2022 | UPDATED: 11:48, Mon, Jul 4, 2022

Lukashenko says Russia ‘must be ready’ to use nuclear arsenal

The news comes as tension mounts over the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine as several key cities fall into Russian control in the east of the country. As global condemnation pours in over the invasion, Russian state media has hit back with continual warnings of nuclear strikes against targets in the West, including London and New York.

Releasing the news, Interfax said: “From July 1, 2022, in order to strengthen the defence capability of our state, shifts of the Main Centre for Geophysical Monitoring began to carry out round-the-clock duty.”

The centre, which opened on June 1, is tasked with identifying the sources of man-made “geophysical disturbances” as well as nuclear explosions, Interfax reported.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, relations between Moscow and the West have become increasingly tense, with politicians in both Russia and the United States speaking publicly about the risk of nuclear war.

President Vladimir Putin said in February that he was putting the country’s nuclear forces on high alert, citing what he called aggressive statements by NATO leaders and economic sanctions against Moscow.

Russia’s official military deployment principles allow for the use of nuclear weapons if they – or other types of weapons of mass destruction – are used against it, or if the state faces an existential threat.

In spite of Russia’s announcement to monitor any man-made ‘noise’ that could be created by either launching or testing nuclear weapons, it is Moscow that has continually used rhetoric threatening the use.

Speaking of whether NATO allies should be prepared for a Russian strike, former British Ambassador to Washington Sir Kim Darroch said: “There’s an analysis that I think has been done by somebody recently, a think tank, that they’re looking at about 35 mentions or perhaps it’s a little bit more now.”

It is assumed that if Russia were to use nuclear weapons, it would do so in an attack on Ukraine, and not on a NATO state which would trigger Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, hence launching a full-scale response.

In such an attack, short-range, lower yield ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons – of which there are thought to be more than 1,000 in reserve – would be the most likely used.

It is thought that any such weapons should they be launched, will be taken from storage and attached to missiles, bombers or as shell artillery.

The Russian President recently supervised an exercise focusing on the readiness of military command and control, combat crews, warships, and strategic missile carriers, as well as the reliability of strategic nuclear and non-nuclear weapons.

Furthermore, Putin has announced the so-called “Satan II”, a missile capable of carrying over 10 warheads would be ready to launch by the end of the year.

The hypersonic missile is capable of reaching key cities in Europe in just over three minutes, and just under fifteen if fired at New York from Russia.

Aside from Russia, North Korea has also been stepping up its nuclear programme in recent times.

The pariah state has essentially completed restoration work at its Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Facility and appears to be expanding construction activity into a second tunnel, according to a new analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

After conducting a record number of missile tests this year, including an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the United States, South Korea and Japan believe Pyongyang is gearing up for its first nuclear test in five years.

Punggye-ri was dismantled in 2018 – with North Korea sharing eye-catching pictures of the tunnel entrances being blown up – as the country embarked on a brief period of high-level diplomacy over denuclearisation.

The CSIS analysis said the images showed new construction materials near the entrance to the portal at Tunnel No 4, which was destroyed in 2018.

A report by Loughborough University has suggested Ukraine could begin building a nuclear arsenal or start buying nuclear weapons to increase its country’s defences against Putin.

Dr Paul Maddrell, a lecturer in international history and international relations, at Loughborough, said that these brutal assaults, being carried out to help Putin achieve his three main aims – to dismember Ukraine, weaken its military and reverse the expansion of NATO – could force President Zelenskyy to consider building a nuclear deterrent.

He said: “If I were the President of Ukraine, I’d strongly be considering developing nuclear weapons.

“Ukraine had nuclear weapons in the 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed.

“There were nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory, which became Ukraine’s and Ukraine agreed to give them up to denuclearise Europe and make it a safer place.

“Well, if it had kept those nuclear weapons, Putin would not have invaded because he would have faced a nuclear attack on his country.

He ended “Zelensky, if he’s prevented from joining NATO, may well think that the only way forward is to develop nuclear weapons – as he may do.”