Section IIX to IX are perturbing.....
How World War III became possible
........There is a growing chorus of political analysts, arms control experts, and government officials who are sounding the alarm, trying to call the world's attention to its drift toward disaster. The prospect of a major war, even a nuclear war, in Europe has become thinkable, they warn, even plausible. What they describe is a threat that combines many of the hair-trigger dangers and world-ending stakes of the Cold War with the volatility and false calm that preceded World War I a comparison I heard with disturbing frequency........
Lukyanov, pointing to the US and Russian military buildups along Eastern Europe, also worried that an accident or provocation could be misconstrued as a deliberate attack and lead to war. In the Cold War, he pointed out, both sides had understood this risk and installed political and physical infrastructure think of the "emergency red phone" to manage tensions and prevent them from spiraling out of control. That infrastructure is now gone. "All those mechanisms were disrupted or eroded," he said. "That [infrastructure] has been degraded since the end of the Cold War because the common perception is that we dont need it anymore."
That the world does not see the risk of war hanging over it, in other words, makes that risk all the likelier. For most Americans, such predictions sound improbable, even silly. But the dangers are growing every week, as are the warnings.
"One can hear eerie echoes of the events a century ago that produced the catastrophe known as World War I," Harvard professor and longtime Pentagon adviser Graham Allison one of the graybeards of American foreign policy wrote in a May cover story for the National Interest, co-authored with Russia analyst Dimitri Simes. Their article,
"Russia and America: Stumbling to War," warned that an unwanted, full-scale conflict between the US and Russia was increasingly plausible.
In Washington, the threat feels remote. It does not in Eastern Europe. Baltic nations, fearing war, have already
begun preparing for it. So has Sweden: "We see Russian intelligence operations in Sweden we can't interpret this in any other way as preparation for military operations against Sweden," a Swedish security official announced in March.
In May, Finland's defense ministry sent letters to 900,000 citizens one-sixth of the population telling them to prepare for conscription in case of a "crisis situation." Lithuania has
reinstituted military conscription. Poland, in June,
appointed a general who would take over as military commander in case of war.
Though Western publics remain blissfully unaware, and Western leaders divided, many of the people tasked with securing Europe are treating conflict as more likely. In late April, NATO and other Western officials gathered in Estonia, a former Soviet republic and NATO member on Russia's border that Western analysts most worry could become ground zero for a major war with Russia.
At the conference, Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow
spoke so openly about NATO's efforts to prepare for the possibility of Russia launching a limited nuclear strike in Europe that, according to the journalist Ahmed Rashid, who was in attendance, he had to be repeatedly reminded he was speaking on the record........