Would a Kamala Harris administration increase the risk of nuclear war?

(Crisis Magazine) — A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for nuclear war.

A shocking statement, to be sure, but one that is echoed by some of America’s top Russia experts. International affairs analyst and historian Gilbert Doctorow, who spent years in Russia, is fluent in Russian, and still has numerous highly-placed contacts there, warns that, thanks to the actions of the Biden-Harris administration, we are closer to nuclear war than ever in history.

The late Russia scholar Stephen Cohen, also highly experienced and well-connected, was already warning in 2018 that nuclear war could be imminent due to the trouble that Obama’s CIA and State Department had stirred up by staging the 2014 coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected government. Ten years after, high officials on both sides of the conflict are now discussing nuclear war as if it is a thinkable option.

Jeffrey Sachs has been brokering international negotiations for decades, working at such high levels that he was literally in the room with Boris Yeltsin at the Kremlin on Christmas Day 1991, when the heads of the Soviet armed forces agreed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Sachs now warns that we are closer to nuclear war than humanity has ever been, even during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Both Sachs and Doctorow, despite otherwise being very calm, cool-headed intellectuals, are in near-panic at how close to the brink of nuclear war the Biden-Harris administration, through its constant escalations and stubborn refusal to negotiate, has brought us.

I am old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. The usual narrative is that President Kennedy single-handedly resolved it. What was kept secret at the time and only became known later is that Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, who actually talked on the phone to each other, together negotiated a resolution. The U.S.S.R. agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from Cuba in exchange for the U.S. removing its nuclear missiles from Turkey.

Even less known is that in the tense weeks of October 1962, when both the U.S. and the Soviets had naval vessels in the waters between Cuba and the U.S., the captain of a Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear torpedo felt explosions near the sub and feared that his vessel was under U.S. attack.

Soviet military policy required that in that situation the submarine must fire its torpedoes at the nearby U.S. ships. Meanwhile, U.S. policy dictated that if attacked with a nuclear weapon of any sort, the U.S. must, in turn, launch an all-out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. But a Soviet officer, Vasily Arkhipov, outranked the ship’s captain and vetoed the order to fire. The nuclear torpedo was not launched.

It soon was discovered that the nearby explosions were depth charges being dropped by a U.S. plane to try to get the sub to surface. They were not an actual attack. It had been a false alarm. But if not for that one Soviet officer’s reluctance to fire at that moment – and his willingness to defy his fellow officers – World War III could have ensued, and we might not be here today.

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Think about that. A Soviet patriot – raised in, trained by, and loyal to a communist government – had an individual conscience that made him take a “wait and see” attitude – under excruciating time pressure, with tremendous stakes involved – rather than a “trust the order and fire away” attitude. And so the world was spared – just barely – from nuclear war.

Indeed, in 2002, Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archives, described Arkhipov as “the man who saved the world.” Arkhipov risked not only his own career, with possible court-martial or worse, but he accepted the moral responsibility for the possible deaths of all his crew. For how could he know with certainty that it wasn’t a real attack? Arkhipov’s actions are a poignant lesson in courage, in the moral sense that God has designed into every human being, and in the way that huge, world-changing events can rest on the shoulders of one solitary individual.

Sixty-two years later, our weapons systems have become much more automated; the human factor in decisions to launch has been wildly reduced. Accidents that could start WWIII are much more likely now than in 1962. Meanwhile, thanks to our media, American’s hatred toward Russia exceeds anything seen even during the Cold War.

Since 2022, the Biden-Harris administration has forbidden negotiations with Russia and empowered Ukraine to continue a war that has resulted in the depopulation of that country and the destruction of its communities. Meanwhile, a Ukrainian law passed in 2021 under pressure from the U.S.-controlled International Monetary Fund opened up, for the first time, ownership of Ukrainian agricultural land to foreign corporations. Today, Western corporations such as Monsanto now own more land in western Ukraine than the Russians have taken over in eastern Ukraine.

Besides physical homelessness, millions of Ukrainians have been made spiritually homeless by the Zelensky regime’s outlawing of Ukraine’s largest church, the centuries-old Ukrainian Orthodox Church. In short, the nation of Ukraine is being obliterated.

For all the agony inflicted on Ukraine, an even more horrible fate could be unleashed upon the whole world, as some American political leaders – especially Team Kamala – talk belligerently about doubling down on the war against Russia, the world’s largest nuclear power. They are playing with fire of unimaginable proportions.

Even the most optimistic estimates put the death toll from a global nuclear war – including indirect effects such as starvation and disease caused by destruction of agriculture, the power grid, and transportation – in the billions. Therefore, since the nuclear age began, the primary responsibility of the U.S. president, who has sole authority to order the use of nuclear weapons, is to avoid creating situations that could result in a nuclear war.

We must pray that if worst comes to worst, individuals like the heroic Vasily Arkhipov will resist orders to launch nuclear weapons. In the meantime, we must do everything we can to politically defeat Kamala Harris and all those who promote the idea that a nuclear war is “winnable” – as they move us ever closer to it. These people are not just the enemies of some Americans but of all Americans – and indeed, of the human race.

Editor’s note: This article is not an endorsement by LifeSiteNews for any political candidate for office.

Reprinted with permission from Crisis Magazine.