Friday, November 9, 2018

Unheeded Warnings


Gorbachev warns against new cold war, again:

Tom Balmforth (2018, November 8). Frail Mikhail Gorbachev warns against return to the Cold War. Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-gorbachev/frail-mikhail-gorbachev-warns-against-return-to-the-cold-war-idUSKCN1ND2W6
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, warned on Thursday against rising tensions between Russia and the United States and said there should be no return to the Cold War… Last month in a column for the New York Times, Gorbachev denounced the United States after President Donald Trump said he planned to quit the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty which Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan signed in 1987.
Are we sliding toward or already immersed in a new "cold" war?

Following Michael Klare's argument (here), I address the character of rising global tensions in this post:  "New Cold War or Global Tinderbox?" 

What is the point of rising tensions, besides the obvious global gambit for resources as they run out?

The answer can be found in this headline:
Thompson, Scott (2018, May 17). Aerospace and Defense Industry Scores Record Profit in 2017; Poised for Significant Growth in 2018 http://usblogs.pwc.com/industrialinsights/2018/05/17/aerospace-and-defense-industry-scores-record-profit-in-2017-poised-for-significant-growth-in-2018/

…With President Trump signing the 2018 omnibus spending bill, which sets the Department of Defense budget at $700 billion, the outlook for defense contractors is strong and is expected to show accelerating growth in defense revenue and profit….
Craziness.






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1 comment:

  1. Time to consider things over which we have no control. The sun, asteroids, comets, space debris . . . cosmic rays. No matter what we do these things will do whatever the physics involved guides them to do, and we are totally left out of the planning. I suppose I might want to add in diseases that just pop up out of viral and bacterial environments pretty well hidden in millions of places. When it comes to the above we are at the mercy of fate.

    Now nuclear war is apparently something over which we might have some control. So better to focus on this catastrophic possibility than face something over which we can not hope to gain control. Right? But just one nicely sized and invisible space rock flying from the direction of the sun . . . take a look at what happened when a rather small rock exploded over Siberia at the beginning of the 20th century! We know these things impact the earth now and then and have changed the climate radically and devastated large areas and led to many extinctions. Even if we all led angelic lives these explosive visitors would still arrive even unannounced. So my thinking is that we ought to prepare ourselves psychologically and not wait till one of them begins to pay a visit. Anyway we could benefit from a vacation from blame.

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