Kate Hudson's Blog

CND and the other anti-nuclear groups campaigning over the last
months to stop the anti-missile shield have failed to do so.

On the other hand the geo-political opposition to NATO expansion:
German and French opposition to admission of Ukraine and Georgia,
Greek opposition (though for very specialised reasons) to admission
of FYROM is, for the moment, holding. The United States government
did not get EVERYTHING it wanted.

I must admit to always having been cool to the idea of campaigning
over the "anti-missile shield". More than cool. I have been sarcastic
towards the people in the Synaspismos who asked me a year or two back
to join the anti-missile shield campaign.

They are the same people who in the eighties were talking to me about
the fallacies of nuclear deterrence, about there being "no good and
bad nuclear weapons" (Soviet nuclear weapons, though good in the 80s
for the pro-Moscow KKE, were not good for Eurocommunists). Now, it
seems, Russian nuclear weapons are OK again. CND president Kate
Hudson says that the missile shield would give the USA the
ability "to strike without fear of retaliation". The invitation to
join the campaign against the anti-missile shield was an invitation
to join a campaign in defence of RUSSIAN "NUCLEAR DETERRENCE".

What do I know about Russian nuclear weapons? Do I know to what
extent the Russian military and the Russian president, really control
them? Gorbachev himself always refused to "press the nuclear button",
or have anything to do with it, even for the purpose of military
exercises. Vladimir Putin might have chosen in the past to use the
image of heading a "nuclear power" to look tough and win presidential
elections, using the same formula that has been so successful in the
West. (Even Tony Blair was not ashamed, early in his Prime
Ministership, to flex putative "nuclear muscles" at a Labour Party
conference) but how much substance is behind it? Particularly for
the Russians. Did not the last head of the KGB, Krioutchkov, say at
his trial that the August 1991 hardliners' coup against Gorbachev was
largely motivated by fears that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was about
to come under the control of the United States? Was this true? What
has changed in the meantime?

Boris Yeltsin was even more anti-Soviet-nuke than Gorbachev. He
wanted to get rid not just of the Soviet nuclear weapons stationed in
Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan but the ones in Russia as well. Just
after the August coup in the Russian Duma he proposed 95% unilateral
cuts. But he got no support from the West from these proposals, even
from the anti-nuclear movements.

When Putin was preparing his moves to displace Yeltsin what deals did
he make with the "foreign factor" on the question of nuclear weapons?
We don't know the answer to ANY of the questions. And we are supposed
to be willing to expend effort defending RUSSIAN NUCLEAR DETERRENCE?
What a joke!!!

It seems that it is the geopolitical and the conventional military
factor that is still decisive. The Europeans were not willing take
the risk of military adventures in the Ukraine or the Caucusus, as if
NOBODY has learnt ANYTHING from the two world wars of the 20th
century. Greece was not willing to torpedo the foundations of its own
state for the sake of letting FYROM into NATO as the Republic of
Macedonia. But everybody was willing to spend limitless amounts of
taxpayers' money on the latest "military" boondoggle, if by so doing
they can keep the Americans happy and off their backs.

Because states-people live a seperate reality to the civic reality and they want to protect their interests and livlihoods by maximizing the potential for warfare. What all activists need to do is collaborate on a project which emphasizes the need to create a taxation policy by which we can pick and choose which state-services we want. Participation Democracy - vote with our wallets!