Potentially Ending All Life by Nuclear Conflagration

Hick Planet magazine

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Wednesday, 2024 December 25th

issue 15

We note here the nature of the war-machine system and how it has been both imperiling us and collapsing our economy for so long. We may look at details of President John F. Kennedy’s turn from being a Cold Warrior to someone struggling to prevent America’s national security apparatus and the military-industrial complex from plunging the world into a catastrophic nuclear holocaust. Documentation has come to light in recent decades of some noteworthy events that include:

• Pope John XXIII’s secret diplomacy (in his last dying days) between Nikita Khrushchev and President Kennedy;

• during the Cuban missile crisis, Khrushchev reading Anatoliy Dobrynin’s cable stating that Robert F. Kennedy was telling Dobrynin that President Kennedy expected he could likely be overthrown by his own US government;

• the US general staff demanding that Kennedy authorize them to launch a surprise nuclear attack on Russia in which they would hope to be able to kill at the very least 140,000,000 Russians;

• the general staff telling Kennedy that they expected that the US would be lucky enough to have only 30,000,000 Americans killed in the aftermath of such a first strike that they were insisting was absolutely necessary for them to launch (so as to win the Cold War);

• discussions showing that the US knew that the Russians had already created a 100-megaton bomb (5,000 times the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) and that the Russians were ready to use these if such warfare broke out;

• the letter that Jackie Kennedy wrote to Khrushchev in her final hours in the White House after President Kennedy’s murder.

We look back at the history of the nuclear confrontation between America and Russia in the early 1960s, and we see that at that time, millions of Americans anxiously waited for days, watching the skies, waiting to see if Russian missiles would appear, bringing their doom.

But as the years and decades have passed, later disclosures and documentation have revealed that their fears were not really nearly as great as they should have been; the two superpowers came closer than was realized at the time to destroying each other—and much of the rest of the world—in nuclear annihilation.

THE READER IS INVITED TO TAKE NOTE OF THIS MESSAGE

	Veterans For Peace Veterans For Peace is a global organization of military veterans and allies dedicated to building a culture of peace by using our unique experiences as veterans.
	We recognize that we have an obligation to heal the wounds of war, not only among our fellow veterans but also the wounds that our war-making has affected around the globe. You can be a part of this growing movement!
	https://www.veteransforpeace.org	(314) 725-6005

In the long time since, the destructive capabilities of such weaponry are so much more devastating. The range at which these weapons can be targeted and the speeds at which they can be propelled are so great as to be nearly unfathomable. The numbers of these weapons—and of those who possess and control them—gets harder to calculate. The propensity, of those who do control them, to use them, intentionally—or even more terrifyingly—inadvertently, becomes ever less knowable.

And at the center of this is America, the nation who first created nuclear weaponry, who is still the only power—the only country or even stateless power—that has ever used a nuclear weapon against masses of human beings, and who did so multiple times.

If just one of these weapons were ever to be used, can we guess what the likelihood might be of all-out war breaking out?

Can we know, in the aftermath of a total nuclear conflagration, whether any form of life at all would be able to survive on this earth? Might the earth become completely uninhabitable for even the cockroaches, for even molds or fungus, for even the simplest of bacteria?