Schiller Institute Conference: “Another Step Closer to Nuclear Armageddon”

The Schiller Institute sponsored on Oct. 2 an emergency online conference titled “Another Step Closer to Nuclear Armageddon — Germany Needs a New Security Architecture”, which focused on the role of Germany in the current strategic situation. In opening the event, Helga Zepp-LaRouche reviewed the “cascading events which are spinning out of control”, in particular the recent ghastly developments in Israel’s attacks on its neighbors. If it comes to an escalation against Iran, the entire region could explode, and beyond, since Russia has a military agreement with Iran, and China has fundamental interests there.

The second acute danger point is the war in Ukraine, where she reminded the viewers that Russia recently announced changes to its nuclear doctrine, so that if there is a significant air attack on the country that is backed by a nuclear power, Russia could resort to first use of nuclear weapons.

A very special guest speaker was the former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, Jack Matlock, who was a personal witness to and participant in the dramatic events during the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Warsaw Pact. He addressed the failures of the Western policy following the fall of the Soviet Union. At the end of the Cold War, he said, “we should have insisted that a European structure be built that would guarantee security for all of the newly-independent countries, including Russia. Instead, we started simply expanding NATO.” That, he called “a huge mistake”, since “there was no threat from the East”. We now know from historical records that the U.S.S.R. had never intended to invade Western Europe. Then, in this century, the U.S. began to walk out of all the arms control agreements.

On Ukraine, he noted that “War anywhere is a horrible thing. And the war in Ukraine is damaging Ukraine much more than any other country. But, one of the things we hear now, I would not agree with: People say, ‘If you don’t stop Russia now, Russia will go after the Baltic states or Poland or Eastern Europe.’ That’s nonsense! There’s no evidence whatsoever! And anybody who really, intimately, knows the history of that area, knows that Russia’s relations with Ukraine and Belarus are very special.”

Ambassador Matlock was followed by Dr. Ted Postol, Professor Emeritus of MIT, and a leading expert on nuclear weapons, who warned that the proposed introduction of missiles to Germany by the U.S. would be a hair-trigger for nuclear war, because those missiles of necessity would carry nuclear warheads and because of the extremely short warning times for Russian detection (cf. SAS 38/24). Other speakers included VIPS co-founder Ray McGovern, German intelligence expert Rainer Rupp, French strategy consultant, Col. Alain Corvez (ret.), and German author Wolfgang Effenberger. The proceedings are available on video here, and a selection of the speeches will be published in EIR Magazine.