YouTube link here.

Below is an interview of Aaron Mate by Judge Napolitano that discusses this issue as well.

YouTube link here.

By Gordon Hahn, Website, 9/22/24

A river runs through Russian and, more recently, Ukrainian history. Ironically enough, the Dnieper River that unites Russia and Ukraine in this and other ways – the river rises in the Valdai Hills of Smolensk, Russia and runs through Belarus and Ukraine – is now the focus of the greatest schism in the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations. Russian forces appear impossible to stop and will arrive at the Dnieper at some point along its snaking length no later than next year, with Russian troops perhaps controlling the river’s and the country’s Left Bank by then. Russia – as well as the West and whatever remains of Ukraine‘s Maidan regime will then face some serious decisions.

The Dnieper River in Russian and Ukrainian History

The Dnieper River has played a major role in Russian and Ukrainian history and is now positioned to so again. The Dnieper drove the foundation of the first Russian city and state. The first Russian state of Kievan Rus rose from the city-state of Kiev, founded by Vikings as a result of the early small port town‘s location on the great north-south water route, the Amber Road, flowing between Scandinavia (the Swedish Viking Varangians) and Byzantian Constantinople. Thus, the Dnieper gave birth to ‚the mother of Russian cities‘ and connected Kievan Rus to what would become the source of much of Russian culure: Greek or Eastern Orthodoxy.

The Zaporozhian Cossacks, famous in Russia and Ukraine, as well as other Cossack formations, were located on the Dnieper, the Zaporozhians in the marshes and islands on the Lower Dniper near its Black Sea estuary. The Dnieper became the dividing line between Polish- and Russian-controlled ‚Ukrainian‘ lands, with the western side of what today is Ukraine called the ‚Right Bank Ukraine‘ and the eastern side known as ‚Left Bank Ukraine.‘ In the Soviet era, the Dniper’s six major hydroelectric stations and damns were symbols of communist modernization. One is featured near the end of Boris Pasternak’s famous novel Doctor Zhivago, as well as in the British film version of the novel.

The Dnieper was the focus of great battles during what Russians call the ‚Great Patriotic War‘ and what others call ‚World War II.‘ Following the largest tank battle in history at Kursk, the Battle for Dnieper was one of the largest operations of the war, involving four million troops, stretching over nearly 900 miles of front, and lasting over four months in 1943. It opened the way to the liberation of Kiev from the Nazi fascist army on 28 October 1944.

The Dnieper – more accurately one of its tributaries, the Pripyat – was the locus of the world’s first great nuclear disaster in 1986 at Chernobyl‘. The poetic Ukrainian name for the river, Slavutych or Slavuta, taken from an ancient Kievan Rus name for the river became the name of the town used to house displaced Chernobyl nuclear power plant workers.

Today, the Dnieper finds itself at the center of history once again.

Russia Marches to the Dnieper: What Then?

By the end of next year, if not earlier, Russian forces likely will reach the Dnieper and perhaps already be laying seige to Zaporozhe, Dnipro, Cherkassk, and, perhaps, Right Bank Kiev. This situation will demand key, pivotal decisions by the NATO-Russian Ukrainian War’s participants: NATO, Russia, and Ukraine.

For Russia, there will be at least three choices: (1) stop territorial advance at the Dnieper and offer peace talks with the threat to cross the Dnieper in lieu of an agreement that precludes NATO expansion to rump Ukraine and Moldova; (2) stop at the Dnieper without offering negotiations and warn the West that Russia will cross the Dnieper should NATO or NATO countries continue any activity or relations with Maidan Ukraine; (3) continue to Right Bank Kiev, the city’s center and country’s capitol, and then to the rest of Right Bank Ukraine without offering any negotiations, only conquest, capitulation, and survival of a Ukrainian or Galician state solely on lands not occupied by Russian troops before a capitulation act is signed by Maidan Ukraine, Washington, and Brussels.

The first option — halting Russian forces‘ territorial advance at the Dnieper while offering peace talks and threatening to cross the Dnieper in lieu of an agreement that precludes NATO expansion to rump Ukraine (and Moldova?) and any other NATO activity in Ukraine and meets other Russian demands – has advantages and weaknesses as do the other options. The obvious advantages are the end of NATO expansion to Ukraine and of the war or ‚special military operation‘ (SMO), assuming the West (and Russia) meet their obligations. The downside from Russia’s perspective is the possibility of the agreement collapsing or being violated by Ukraine and the West at some point in the future, necessitating another SMO or fully-declared war. Assuming Ukraine restores something resembling democracy, the presence of a democratic state on Russia’s border is not a threat to Russia, and is not by itself viewed by Russia as such. Such an assumption is based on the false and largely propagandistic notion that ‚Putin abhors democracy‘ and Russia is inherently antagonistic to democracies. This is false, as demonstrated by Putin’s recently warm visit to democratic Mongolia, located on Russia’s border like Ukraine.

It is important to keep in mind that obstacles to this option include Zelenskiy’s 2022 law forbidding negotiations with Moscow as long as Putin is in power and Putin’s post-Kursk incursion statement that talks with Zelenskiy and his Maidan regime were now excluded as an option. However, there are caveats to both of these. To the first, Kiev apparently was negotiating with Moscow through the Qatari Emir on an agreement – ultimately scuttled seemingly by the Kursk incursion – that two sides would not target each other’s energy-related facilities. To the second, Putin subsequently discussed the option of talks with Kiev as if they were still possible, unlikely albeit, in his view.

The second option – stopping Russian forces‘ advance at the Dnieper without offering negotiations and warning Kiev and the West that Russia will cross the Dnieper and seize all of western Ukraine if there is any continuation of military operations or should NATO or NATO countries continue any activity or relations with Maidan Ukraine – is likely a non-starter for Moscow. This option relies on trusting Kiev and the West far beyond what Moscow is now capable of. Without a binding treaty there remains the threat of a NATO-backed and in future NATO member Ukraine on Russia’s border, with the certainty that Washington and Brussels will re-arm Ukraine/Galicia for a future attack as well as support partisan guerilla and terrorist activity by Ukrainian special forces from western Ukraine and anti-Russian resistance fighters in eastern Ukraine. Putin and Russia would be faced with a long quagmire, draining resources and limiting Russia’s ability to defend itself in other places, where NATO or others may pose security threats. This option leaves open the possibility, indeed likelihood of an all-out NATO-Russia war.

One issue that has been raised by some observers is that Russia must „control“ much if not all of western Ukraine in order to ensure full control of the Dnieper River’s infrastructure such as dams, quality control mechanism, and navigation against western rump Ukraine. It is noted also that managing the river will be an expensive proposition (www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/09/russias-prosecution-of-the-war-in-ukraine-can-it-square-the-circle-of-probable-boundary-conditions.html). River control and management is perhaps one factor that may support any eventual decision to have Russian forces cross the Dnieper, but it is hardly the main one. Key will be the defense of the eastern bank and nearby territories from missile, artillery and drone attacks and from infiltration by sabotage and terrorist cells. Moreover, there are other ways of controlling the river’s west bank and adjacent land other than occupying it or all or most of western Ukraine. The Russians have their own missile, artillery, drone and covert infiltration capacities that can target western Ukraine and perhaps establish a cordone sanitaire within ten or more kilometers from the river. Any peace agreement will have to establish principles and procedures for ensuring the security of the river, broadly conceived, and that of any new Russian territory acquired by Moscow as a result of an agreement or Ukrainian capitulation and attendant consequences and sub-agreements.

The considerations above propose the third option: to cross the Dnieper in order to seize Right Bank Kiev, the city’s center and country’s capitol, and perhaps part or all of Right Bank Ukraine or Galicia without offering any negotiations, only conquest, capitulation, and survival of a Ukrainian or Galician state solely on lands not occupied by Russian troops before a capitulation act is signed by Maidan Ukraine, Washington, and Brussels. This option has the advantages of the first option only after expending more Russian blood and treasure. It has the disadvantages of the second in that it holds even greater risk of the rise of an anti-Russia resistance underground and quagmire, and this even after the great expenditure of blood and treasure seizing all of Ukraine would pose. This option offers a future of years of more war and prolongs the situation in which an all-out NATO-Russia war can begin, rendering that outcome more likely.

As I wrote earlier, it is possible that Moscow will consider and select one of these options but not in relation to crossing the Dnieper but in relation to whether or not to continue to advance after Russian forces have seized all of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts and all of Zaporozhe and Kherson Oblasts. Again, the three options would be similar: stop in these conquered territories and propose talks, stop but not propose talks, or continue hoping for capitulation before the Dnieper, where the same options will face Moscow.

There is no guarantee that any Russian negotiation offers will be accepted by the West and or Ukraine. In that event, the future is obvious: a long war to take western Ukraine, risking quagmire, and NATO intervention. Indeed, the present resistance to negotiations demonstrated by Kiev and, after Kursk, by Moscow as well argues in favour of the third and most tragic and dangerous option being the one most likely to be realised.

By Jeff Childers, Substack, 10/7/24

As the world braces for….[the] anniversary of the barbaric October 7th attacks on Israel and as the war in the Middle East heats up, the influential Financial Times floated a very suggestive proposal yesterday headlined, “Ukraine, Nato membership and the West Germany model.” The sub-headline added, “Security guarantees will have to underpin any peace deal where Russia retains control of Ukrainian land.” So much for “not one inch.”

“Although it remains committed to recovering the lands seized by Russia over the past decade,” the Financial Times regretfully explained, Ukraine “regrettably lacks the manpower, weaponry and western support to do it.” Later, it somberly conceded, “the west patently lacks a strategy for Ukraine to prevail.”

Now they tell us! And here, we all thought they had a strategy of some kind. (Just wait for the next story to see what the current strategy is.) But apparently not. So now they want to split the Ukraine baby.

Now they tell us, Part Deux: “The West German model for Ukraine has been discussed in foreign policy circles for more than 18 months.” Surprise! What they mean by the “West German model” is splitting Ukraine into two parts, like West and East Germany after the Second World War. In that historic scenario, West Germany was allowed to join NATO even though half the country remained under Soviet control.

This overly optimistic scheme suffers from two obvious problems, as the article eventually got around to admitting. First, in Germany, the occupied borders were well-defined, allowing the famous Berlin Wall to be erected right down the line. But in Ukraine, the war marches on, and the ever-changing borders remain fluid.

Second, after the war, the Soviets agreed to the Germany-splitting compromise. Today, Russia will never agree to let West Ukraine join NATO as part of any peace plan. It will never ever happen.

Biden’s neocons, Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, must now divide their attention between the old, difficult, plan-less Ukraine war, and the shiny new war emerging in the Middle East, which is ripe with potential and enthusiasm for a fresh conflict and all its glorious potential.

Meanwhile, things are only getting worse in Eastern Europe’s strategy-free theater of war. Any day now, Ukraine will head into winter and its rasputitsa mud season, further freezing and bogging down prospects for Ukraine’s ‘victory.’

Perhaps it isn’t completely fair to say there’s no strategy. On Saturday, the New York Times ran an eye-watering story headlined, “Ukraine’s Donbas Strategy: Retreat Slowly and Maximize Russia’s Losses.” The agonized sub-headline added, “It’s far from clear if the Ukrainian strategy will succeed.” So, there is a strategy after all.

Talk about trying to put a good spin on failure. The gist was that the Ukrainians are losing, are in retreat all along the front lines, but Kiev has ordered its troops to hold their untenable positions at all costs, in the hope that the Russians will eventually get tired of winning and go home.

That’s it. That’s the whole strategy.

To be clear, Ukraine has an alternative: pulling its troops from vast numbers of unholdable towns and villages, and mustering them together in more defensible positions, such as behind the giant Dnieper river, which divides the country in half. The main advantage of this defensive strategy would be saving tens or hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives.

Instead, Ukrainian martial law coordinator and former comedian Zelensky figures that, despite the astonishingly high cost in lives and free NATO materiel, by holding on till beyond the last minute in every little hamlet and township, the Russians might, sooner or later, get exhausted by all the fighting and give up.

Given that one of Russia’s stated objectives at the outset was to demilitarize Ukraine, it seems unlikely that Russia will get tired anytime soon of killing Ukrainian soldiers by the battalion.

Combined, these two stories, the Financial Times’ and the New York Times’ articles, together revealed the war’s hideous truth. Western war planners don’t care about Ukraine. They don’t care about its courageous soldiers willing to fight Russia to their inglorious deaths. As I reported yesterday, all the West cares about is the Wolfowitz Doctrine: establishing a NATO foothold in Ukraine to keep a lid on Russia and prevent it from becoming a rival world superpower.

In other words, the Ukrainian people and their land are disposable NATO resources. But there isn’t any strategy. Doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result isn’t a strategy, it’s insanity.

But the fact the corporate media conversation and “foreign policy circles” have evolved from a goal of crushing Russia any day now to a strategy of trading land for peace is a great sign. Perhaps the end lies in sight.

By Scott Ritter, Consortium News, 9/27/24

If you’re not thinking about the end of the world by now, you’re either braindead or stuck in some remote corner of the world, totally removed from access to news.

Earlier this month we came closer to a nuclear conflict between the U.S. and Russia than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

[See: SCOTT RITTER: 72 Minutes]

Today we are even closer.

Most scenarios being bandied about in the Western mainstream media that involve a nuclear conflict between Russia and the United States have Russia initiating the exchange by using nuclear weapons against Ukraine in response to deteriorating military, economic, and/or political conditions brought on by the U.S. and NATO successfully leveraging Ukraine as a proxy to achieve the strategic defeat of Russia.

Understand, this is what both Ukraine and the Biden administration mean when they speak of Ukraine “winning the war.”

This is a continuation of the policy objective set forth by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in April 2022, “to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” meaning that Russia should “not have the capability to very quickly reproduce” the forces and equipment that it loses in Ukraine.

This policy has failed; Russia has absorbed four new territories — Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk and Lugansk — into the Russian Federation, and the Russian defense industry has not only replaced losses sustained in the Ukrainian conflict, but is currently arming and equipping an additional 600,000 troops who have been added to the Russian military since February 2022.

It is the United States and its NATO allies that find themselves on their back feet, with Europe facing economic hardship as a result of the extreme blowback that has transpired because of its sanctioning of Russian energy, and the United States watching helplessly as Russia, together with China, turns the once passive BRICS economic forum into a geopolitical juggernaut capable of challenging and surpassing the U.S.-led G7 as the world’s most influential non-governmental organization,

Illusionary Red Lines

As a result of this abysmal failure, policymakers in both the U.S. and Europe are undertaking increasingly brazen acts of escalation designed to bring Russia to the breaking point, all premised on the assumption that all “red lines” established by Russia regarding escalation are illusionary — Russia, they believe, is bluffing.

And if Russia is not bluffing?

Then, the Western-generated scenario paints an apocalyptic picture which has a weak, defeated Russia using nuclear weapons against Ukraine in a last, desperate act of vengeance.

According to this scenario, which the U.S. and NATO not only war-gamed out but made ready to implement when these entities imagined that Russia was preparing to employ nuclear weapons back in late 2022-early 2023, the U.S. and NATO would launch a devastating response against Russian targets deep inside Russia designed to punitively degrade Russian command and control, logistics, and warfighting capacity.

This would be done using conventional weapons.

If Russia opted to retaliate against NATO targets, then the U.S. would have to make a decision — continue to climb the escalation ladder, matching Russia punch for punch until one side became exhausted, or preemptively using nuclear weapons as a means of escalating to de-escalate — launch a limited nuclear strike using low-yield nuclear weapons in hopes that Russia would back down out of fear of what would come next — a general nuclear war.

The Pentagon has integrated such a scenario into the range of nuclear pre-emption options available to the president of the United States. Indeed, in early 2020 U.S. Strategic Command conducted an exercise where the secretary of defense gave the launch instructions for a U.S. Ohio class submarine to launch a Trident missile carrying W-76-2 low yield nuclear warheads against a Russian target in a scenario involving Russian aggression against the Baltics in which Russia used a tactical nuclear weapon to strike a NATO target.

The insanity of this scenario is that it ignores published Russian nuclear doctrine, which holds that Russia will respond with the full power of its strategic nuclear arsenal in the case of a nuclear attack against Russian soil.

Once again, U.S. nuclear war planners believe that Russia is bluffing.

Another Twist

Submarine launch of a Lockheed Trident missile. (DoD, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

There is another twist to this discussion.

While the U.S. might assess that Russia would not seek a general nuclear war following the use by the U.S. of low yield nuclear warheads, the problem is that the means of employment of the W-76-2 warhead is the Trident submarine launched ballistic missile.

While the February 2020 scenario had Russia using nuclear weapons first (something which, at the time, represented a gross deviation from published Russian nuclear doctrine and the declaratory policy statements of the Russian president), the fact is the U.S. will not necessarily wait for Russia to kick things off on the nuclear front.

The United States has long embraced a nuclear posture which not only incorporates the potential of a nuclear first strike, but, through declaratory policy statements, actively encourages America’s potential nuclear adversaries to believe such an action is, in fact, possible.

David J. Trachtenberg, the deputy undersecretary of defense for policy during the Trump administration, said in a speech at the Brookings Institution in 2019 that a key aspect to the U.S. nuclear posture was “keeping adversaries such as Russia and China guessing whether the U.S. would ever employ its nuclear weapons.”

But the U.S. takes the guesswork out of the equation. Theodore Postol points out, in a recent article in Responsible Statecraft, that a new fuse used on the W-76 nuclear warhead (not the low yield W-76-2, but rather the 100 kiloton version) has turned the 890 W-76 warheads loaded on the Trident missiles carried onboard the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines into weapons capable of destroying hardened Russian and Chinese missile silos with a single warhead.

Screenshot of a National Nuclear Security Administration video from 2019 showing the casing of a W-76-1 thermonuclear warhead. (National Nuclear Security Administration, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

This means that, firing in a reduced trajectory profile from a position close to the shores of either Russia or China, the United States possesses the ability to launch a nuclear first strike that has a good chance of knocking out the entire ground-based component of both the Chinese and Russian strategic nuclear deterrent.

As a result, Russia has been compelled to embrace a “launch on detect” nuclear posture where it would employ the totality of its silo-based arsenal the moment it detected any potential first strike by the United States.

Return, for a moment, to the scenario-driven employment of the W-76-2 low-yield nuclear weapon as part of the “escalate to de-escalate” strategy that underpins the entire reason for the W-76-2 weapon to exist in the first place.

When the United States launches the Trident missile carrying the low yield warhead, how are the Russians supposed to interpret this act?

The fact is, if the U.S. ever fires a W-76-2 warhead using a Trident missile, the Russians will assess this action as the initiation of a nuclear first strike and order the launching of its own nuclear arsenal in response.

All because the United States has embraced a policy of “first strike ambiguity” designed to keep the Russians and Chinese guessing about American nuclear intentions.

Change-of-command ceremony in November 2019 at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska for U.S. Strategic Command, which has responsibilities that include strategic deterrence and nuclear operations, including NC3 – command, control and communications. (DOD/Dominique A. Pineiro)

And, to put icing on this nuclear cake, Russia’s response appears to have been to change its nuclear posture to embrace a similar posture of nuclear pre-emption, meaning that rather than wait for the U.S. to actually launch a nuclear-armed missile or missiles against a Russian target, Russia will now seek to pre-empt such an attack by launching its own pre-emptive nuclear strike designed to eliminate the U.S. land-based nuclear deterrent force.

In a sane world, both sides would recognize the inherent dangers of such a forward-leaning posture, and take corrective action.

But we no longer live in a sane world.

Moreover, given the fact that the underlying principle guiding U.S. policies toward Russia is the misplaced notion that Russia is bluffing, any aggressive posturing we might engage in designed to promote and exploit the ambiguity derived from the first-strike potential inherent in existing U.S. nuclear posture will, more likely than not, only fuel Russian paranoia about a potential U.S. nuclear pre-emption, prompting Russia to pre-empt.

Russia isn’t bluffing.

And our refusal to acknowledge this has embarked us on a path where we appear more than willing to pre-empt life itself.

We need to pre-empt nuclear preemption by embracing a policy of strict no- first-use principles.

By choosing deterrence over warfighting.

By deemphasizing nuclear war.

By controlling nuclear weapons through verifiable arms control treaties.

And by eliminating nuclear weapons.

It truly is an existential choice — nuclear weapons or life.

Because they are incompatible with one another.

By Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter, 10/5/24

You can read my review of Fail Safe here. – Natylie

The following article was originally published as part of Dissenter editor Kevin Gosztola’s movie publication The Wide Shot

Within director Sidney Lumet’s film “Fail Safe” lies an idealism that challenges nuclear warfare and the folly of great power competition.

A catastrophic military accident forces the President, played by Henry Fonda, to acknowledge that the United States and the Soviet Union let the Cold War nuclear arms race get out of hand. The President declares, “What we put between us, we can remove.”

The film premiered at the New York Film Festival on September 15, 1964, and opened in the U.S. on October 7. It was based on a book by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, which Walter Bernstein adapted for the screen. Bernstein was blacklisted in the 1950s and understood the fear and paranoia fueled by the Cold War quite well.

Pentagon officials despised the movie and sabotaged the production. “The incidents in ‘Fail Safe’ are deliberate lies!” cried General Curtis LeMay, a professed war criminal who firebombed Tokyo. “Nothing like that could happen.”

More well-known is the fact that director Stanley Kubrick did not want Lumet’s film to be released before “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” which was adapted from a book called “Red Alert.” Kubrick and the book’s authors filed a frivolous plagiarism lawsuit against the authors of “Fail-Safe” that resulted in a settlement.

Kubrick’s bitter act guaranteed that “Fail Safe” would forever exist in the shadow of his movie. As part of the settlement, Columbia Pictures took ownership of the “Fail Safe” film. Columbia also owned “Dr. Strangelove,” and the studio ensured that Kubrick’s nuclear war satire was released before “Fail Safe.”

Lumet recalled, “We opened to no audience whatsoever. You have to look silly after the comedy version has come out.”

“The two movies, ‘Strangelove’ and ‘Fail Safe,’ have everything in common in terms of storyline, and nothing in common in terms of character, intent, or style,” Lumet contended.

Indeed, in “Dr. Strangelove,” the characters are so stuck in their fear, paranoia, and jingoism that the audience is primed to laugh at them for sparking a doomsday event. But “Fail Safe” takes a different approach, presenting viewers with several characters who make a righteous and sincere effort to disentangle themselves from the war machine that may destroy the world.

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Not Even Henry Fonda As The President Can Stop This Catastrophe

A little over a week before “Fail Safe” was released, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s re-election campaign aired the “Daisy” advertisement. In the shocking commercial, a white girl counts daisy petals as she pulls them off the flower. Once she reaches 10, a countdown for a nuclear attack begins. The camera zooms into her left eye that then cuts to a superimposed shot of a detonating nuclear weapon. A mushroom cloud fills the screen.

“These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die,” Johnson states. The ad closes with a voiceover that insists the “stakes are too high” for any American to stay home and not vote.

The message from LBJ’s campaign was that his opponent Barry Goldwater could not be trusted to prevent the world from experiencing total annihilation. Yet “Fail Safe” showed even a nuclear catastrophe could happen even if a supposedly level-headed president was in power.

Fonda had appeared in a number of films as a charismatic, good-natured, and principled character — Abraham Lincoln in “Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939), Tom Joad in “Grapes of Wrath” (1940), Lieutenant Roberts in “Mister Roberts” (1955), Juror 8 in “12 Angry Men” (1957) (also directed by Lumet), Robert A. Leffingwell in “Advise and Consent” (1962), and William Russell in “The Best Man” (1964).

“Fail Safe” works well because it builds on Fonda’s on-screen persona. Audiences had seen Fonda perform as a past U.S. president , pursue a high-ranking position in the executive branch of the U.S. government, and run for U.S. president. Now Fonda actually was the U.S. president. If anyone could save the world, it would be Fonda.

In an underground missile silo in Omaha, Nebraska, General Bogan (Frank Overton) has an exchange with the President about why a group of bombers received the wrong signal and took off to attack Moscow. Bogan is trained to think that the Russians must be behind the incident. However, the President, who is in a bunker in Washington, D.C., sensibly posits that the “fail-safe mechanism” might have given the pilots a go signal as they were trying to make radio contact with Bogan but could not reach him.

The President recognizes that in order to prevent the Soviet Union from being bombed he will have to authorize the shoot-down of those U.S. fighter jets. Tight close-up shots hammer home the weight of this decision. He soon calls the Soviet Premier with Buck, a translator played by Larry Hagman who gives a magnificent performance.

“I want to know what you think he’s feeling,” the President tells Buck just before informing the Soviet Premier that a group of U.S. fighter pilots are about to drop 20-megaton bombs on his country. He also says no matter what the Soviet Premier does at least one U.S. warplane will get through and bomb Moscow.

The scenes between the President and Soviet Premier are remarkable in that the two leaders exchange information about the military capabilities of their countries that is clearly sensitive and top secret. Yet with U.S. fighter jets in Soviet territory, there is no time for posturing as enemy states. The President authorizes any U.S. military cooperation necessary so that the Soviet military can shoot down the U.S. warplanes, even telling the Soviet Premier how to blow up the U.S. military’s air-to-air missiles.

When the two leaders are left with no options to stop the bombing of Moscow, the President orders an attack on the Empire State Building in New York. Only by inflicting a similar holocaust on a major American city does the President believe that the U.S. can atone for what has happened. (In fact, the President knows that his wife is in New York and still goes through with the strike.)

Making A Game Out Of Nuclear War

Embodying the moral depravity of Cold War thinking is Walter Matthau’s character Dr. Groeteschele. The political scientist and civilian adviser to the Pentagon was based upon Herman Kahn, a strategist and theorist for the RAND Corporation who wrote “On Thermonuclear War” in 1960. (Kahn also partly inspired the character of Dr. Strangelove.)

Bernstein and Lumet introduce Groeteschele through a party, where the professor leads a group of Washington elites in a glib discussion of civilian deaths in a nuclear war. Groeteschele believes society should be prepared for 60 million deaths. All wars have winners and losers. “I am a political scientist who would rather have an American culture survive than a Russian one.”

Such parlor chatter about a nuclear holocaust is “fun” for Groeteschele, though it is 5:30 a.m. He has to give a morning lecture in the war room for the Pentagon’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) and leaves with Ilsa Wolfe (Nancy Berg), a socialite who flirtatiously needles the professor.

“We all know we’re going to die, but you make a game out of it. A marvelous game that includes the whole world. You make it seem possible,” Wolfe says. She adds, “You make death an entertainment. Something that can be played in a living room.”

As Groeteschele begins his lecture, he acknowledges that an unidentified flying object has appeared on the military radar. He jokes about “accidental war” and articulates his ideas on limiting nuclear war. The presentation outrages Brigadier General Warren Black (Dan O’Herlihy). “We’re setting up a war machine that acts faster than the ability of men to control it,” Black warns.

The professor’s retort is to “toughen the men.” Even if the U.S. military believes that the Russians accidentally launched a “megaton missile,” shouldn’t the U.S. military retaliate with every possible weapon?

Black is a military man of conscience, who ultimately sacrifices himself in a valiant act of resistance to the war machine that he has perpetuated. And while O’Herlihy’s character bookends the film and may arguably be the movie’s true hero, the heartfelt performance that he gives is upstaged by Fonda as the President.

Later, in a twisted but arresting scene largely owed to Matthau’s performance, Groeteschele makes the case to the President for allowing the U.S. fighter jets to bomb Moscow. “The Russian aim is to dominate the world. They think that communism must succeed eventually if the Soviet Union is left reasonably intact. They know a war would leave the Soviet Union utterly destroyed.”

“They know we might have a doomsday system. Missiles that will go into action days, even weeks, after a war is over and destroy an enemy even after the enemy has destroyed us,” Groeteschele continues. “These are Marxist fanatics, not normal people. They do not reason the way you reason. They’re not motivated by human emotions, such as rage and pity. They are calculating machines. They will look at the balance sheet, and they will see that they cannot win.”

Whistleblower and nuclear war planner Daniel Ellsberg was Kahn’s colleague at RAND. According to Ellsberg, Kahn “had argued that to make a credible first-strike threat, [the U.S.] had to be prepared to show that we would survive a retaliatory strike with our fallout shelters, or at least believe that we would. To do that you had to act as if you believed — as Kahn did — that shelters would make all the difference, and you had to encourage people to build them.”

The nuclear war theorist conceived of a “Doomsday Machine” that could destroy all human life as an automated response to a nuclear attack. Yet even Kahn understood that developing a system was “undesirable.”

Also, in 1961, Kahn did not think a “Doomsday Machine” could be built. Or that the U.S. or Soviet Union would consider developing such a machine.

Contrary to Kahn’s assertions, Ellsberg wrote, “[A]n American Doomsday Machine already existed in 1961 — and had for years — in the form of pre-targeted bombers on alert in the Strategic Air Command (SAC), soon to be joined by Polaris submarine-launched missiles. Although this machine wasn’t likely to kill outright or starve to death literally every last human, its effects, once triggered, would come close enough to that to deserve the name Doomsday.”

Pentagon Waged A Campaign Against The Film

Donald Baruch was the Pentagon’s primary liaison with Hollywood for four decades. In 1964, as journalist David Robb highlighted in his 2004 book “Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies,” Baruch sabotaged the film.

Not only did Baruch refuse to grant the production “access to stock footage of U.S. warplanes,” but he also had the Pentagon pressure “commercial film libraries not to give [Lumet] any footage of American bombers in flight.”

“I needed footage of bombers, and this is footage that’s available from rental houses which had the stuff,” Lumet recalled. However, the “rental houses” yielded to the Pentagon, which meant that the production had to bootleg a shot of a Convair B-58 Hustler that they could use over and over again.

It was not the first time that the government had refused to cooperate with a Hollywood production. What was “extroardinary was that the Pentagon “cut off the rental houses,” Lumet declared. That pushed “Fail Safe” to portray the invasion of Russian airspace in a much more simple manner like it was a stage play.

Like with “Dr. Strangelove,” Lumet was unable to get any photographs from Strategic Air Command that would help the production develop a realistic set. Production designer Albert Brenner ultimately created the interior of SAC by constructing mainframe computers with boxes that were affixed with discs. The radar screen was hand-drawn and animated.

Columbia attached a Pentagon disclaimer at the end of the film that further irritated the filmmakers.

“The producers of this film wish to stress that it is the stated position of the Department of Defense and the United States Air Force that a rigidly enforced system of safeguards and controls insure that occurrences such as those directed in this story cannot happen,” the disclaimer stated.

But the commander of SAC from 1948 to 1957 was none other than war criminal General Curtis LeMay.

Of course, LeMay thought the movie was a bunch of lies. He opposed the development of smaller bombs for “limited war” because he wanted the Pentagon to always have one nuclear warhead that was big enough to wipe out the entire population of Russia.

The United States and North-Atlantic Treaty Organization’s encirclement of Russia and Russia’s subsequent invasion of Ukraine have perpetuated a war that now sees two nuclear powers risking catastrophe yet again. President Joe Biden even authorized Ukraine to launch attacks deep inside of Russia.

What is between the U.S. and Russia in 2024 should be removed, like Fonda’s President character suggests in the movie. However, the actions of U.S. officials indicate that a “Fail Safe”-type accident is more likely to occur before they ever take steps to coexist and disarm.