WARNING: RABBIT HOLES AHEAD!

 

I’VE BEEN READING about the 1963 assassination of the American president, John Kennedy, and to read anything that goes beyond the Warren Commission conclusions of 1964 or the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) findings, which also reviewed the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, or the released files from 1992’s Assassination Records Review Board and subsequent releases, is to step into any number of rabbit holes. The big one, of course: did Oswald act alone or was there a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy? On that point, the jury is still out, but 2007’s JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglass outlines a scenario in which Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed the “patsy” he claimed to be when shouting to reporters as he was brought into custody by Dallas police. Douglass suggests the CIA or rogue Deep State elements used a “fake” Oswald to ‘place’ the hapless Oswald in key locations before and after the assassination so police could track and presumably shoot and kill him, making for a tidy end to any investigation. For example, Douglass reports that “fake” Oswald was seen getting into a station wagon outside the Texas School Book Depository and less than a half-hour later was observed several miles from Dealy Plaza, just blocks from the Texas Theatre (where patsy real-Oswald was captured). Did “fake” Oswald shoot and kill police officer J.D. Tippet before fleeing on foot to the theatre? Did real-Oswald make the journey from Dealy Plaza by bus and cab? What about the Oswald seen getting into a station wagon minutes after the assassination? Was it a case of mistaken identity by witnesses or evidence of a conspiracy?

The movie theatre may have been a rendezvous point given to Oswald by his ‘handlers’. And so, fake-Oswald fades from the scene while real-Oswald awaits his impending arrest inside the movie theatre. Douglass suggests the desired scenario envisioned by the Deep State actors was for Oswald to be killed by the police following the murder of their fellow officer. Real-Oswald was armed with a handgun and initially resisted arrest, so by not shooting Oswald, the Dallas police may have inadvertently foiled the carefully constructed plot of the planners.

    Real or Fake?

IT SHOULD BE NOTED that the forensic evidence around the handgun found in Oswald’s possession was not entirely conclusive. Interestingly, in his book, On the Trail of the Assassins, New Orleans’ District Attorney Jim Garrison—who in 1969 unsuccessfully prosecuted businessman Clay Shaw for conspiring in the murder of President Kennedy—accuses Dallas police of mishandling the forensic analysis of handgun. In fact, Garrison says real-Oswald did not shoot Tibbit.

 

🐇THAT’S JUST A TASTE of the rabbit holes surrounding the Kennedy assassination.  I should say that I found such a conspiracy as Douglass envisions unwieldy, with too much that could go wrong. Such a plan would entail a rigorous timetable, for example, having fake-Oswald shoot Tibbit, flee on foot to the Texas Theatre, be seen entering, then vanish before the police arrived, leaving real-Oswald inside the movie house holding the bag. It seems way too complicated, with too many things that could go wrong. Note: from the time Kennedy was killed to when Oswald was arrested was just over 1½ hours. 

He or his double was seen on the sixth floor of the Book Depository before the three shots were apparently fired from at Kennedy's motorcade. However, real-Oswald was seen in a lower floor cafeteria minutes after the shooting, having somehow gotten there via stairs where he would have been seen by co-workers. So, does that mean real-Oswald had been in the cafeteria during the shooting? It's an intriguing possibility.  He was seen waiting for a bus near the Depository shortly after the assassination. The driver of the cab he later hailed identified real-Oswald as his passenger. Later, he was seen entering the Texas Theatre. There were numerous witnesses that day, but one wonders what they truly saw. Or heard. Or understood what their senses told them. An audio recording taken from a police motorcycle radio at the scene seems to capture the sound of four shots being fired. But, only some witnesses along the parade route recall hearing four shots.

 

🐇 WAS THERE A CONSPIRACY or is that pure fantasy? Was Oswald the lone gunman or the fall guy? The Warren Commission investigating Kennedy’s assassination, in tracking Oswald’s movements in the weeks and months before he got a job* at the Book Depository, concludes:

 

“[T]he Committee agreed with the Warren Commission that Oswald had visited Mexico City and concluded that "the majority of evidence tends to indicate" that Oswald visited the consulates, but the Committee could not rule out the possibility that someone else had used his name in visiting the consulates.” 

(Wikipedia) [italics mine]

 

The above HSCA quote refers to an October 1963 visit that (real or fake) Oswald made to Mexico City to obtain travel visas for his family to travel to Cuba and the USSR. Was this Oswald? And if it was someone impersonating him, as Douglass writes and as members of both the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations speculate, then the “lone gunman” thesis gets tossed out the window.

Additionally, in 1992, the newly formed Assassination Records Review Board (AARB) which collated the Kennedy files held by various agencies, also suggests the possibility of a conspiracy:

 

“In 1992, following popular political pressure in the wake of the film JFK, the ARRB…was created by the “JFK Records Act” to collect and preserve the documents relating to the assassination. In a footnote in its final report, the ARRB wrote: "Doubts about the Warren Commission's findings were not restricted to ordinary Americans. Well before 1978, President Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy, and four of the seven members of the Warren Commission all articulated, if sometimes off the record, some level of skepticism about the Commission's basic findings." (Wikipedia) ¹

 

Even President Johnson, Kennedy’s successor as Vice President, in a post-presidential interview with CBS News, told Walter Cronkite he had never been convinced that a lone gunman killed Kennedy. And while I’m not entirely convinced by Douglass’s “fake Oswald" scenario, there are other suggestive observations he makes that do indeed point to a conspiracy.

🐇 FOR EXAMPLE, Oswald seems to have had contact or interactions of some sort with the CIA (and FBI) beginning in the mid-1950s. What's up with that? 

[Incidentally, he was only 24 when Jack Ruby murdered him on live television, two days after Kennedy's assassination. And Ruby's motivations and involvement in all this is another rabbit hole that will suck you right in. Beware! Ed.]

 

Oswald was born in New Orleans in 1939 and grew up there and in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He was characterized as a loner by those who knew him, a troubled teen with a spotty high school record, though he did read voraciously.  At 17 he joined the U.S. Marines and was stationed in Mississippi where he studied radar and aircraft surveillance systems and was, incidentally, an above average marksman. In 1957 he was transferred to the Naval Air Facility Atsugi, near Tokyo, Japan. This was the base where the CIA operated its U-2 spy plane missions over the Soviet Union. It is conceivable that Oswald acquired important, classified signals information on U-2 flight patterns and operation specs, after all he had a security clearance to access “sensitive” information in the performance of his job. He was in Japan for over 1½ years, then transferred to California, again as a radar operator, when he resigned his position in 1959. That year he defected to the USSR. Douglass speculates that the information he possessed on U-2 flight operations contributed to the famous May 1 downing of Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane over the USSR in 1960 and his capture by Soviet authorities. As an aside: the revelations of American spying operations inside the USSR scuttled the upcoming Nuclear Arms Control talks between the U.S. and the USSR that were scheduled to be held later that spring in Geneva, and from which an angry Chairman Khrushchev withdrew. It was only in the last months of his presidency, in the fall of 1963, that Kennedy was able to ink the Nuclear Test Ban treaty, the first one of its kind, with the USSR's Khrushchev. 

Riddle me this: Who might benefit from sinking the upcoming summit? Hint: the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) and cold warriors on both sides. Oswald may have been instrumental in this outcome.

🐇 ANOTHER PUZZLE is how easily he returns to the United States in 1962 with his new Russian wife and young daughter, after their ship docked in New York. Recall that he had previously renounced his U.S. citizenship when he entered the USSR in 1959. He may have left the United States with information on classified radar technology, and spent two years in the USSR, yet upon his return, American security agencies apparently had no interest in him. He was allowed to return and there were no red flags on his file. Why? Douglass speculates Oswald was a CIA asset and that he was involved in a “double agent” confabulation. His defection to the USSR was seemingly genuine, so much so that he was recruited by the KGB, Douglass continues, to return home to the U.S. and to spy for them. Was Oswald part of a CIA covert operation and his embrace of communism and the Soviet Union merely a ruse? Reading Douglass’s book gives the reader the impression that the CIA and FBI were around Oswald like a bad smell.

 

IT’S ALSO INTERESTING to note the number of people in Lee and Marina Oswald's lives with CIA connections. For example, the Traveler's Aid Society volunteer worker, a Bulgarian émigré and academic named Spas T. Rankin, who assisted and met the Oswalds upon their arrival in New York in 1962, belonged to organizations with known CIA ties. When Oswald and his pregnant wife moved to Dallas in early 1963, they were assisted by the flamboyant oil industry executive George de Mohrenschildt who had even more CIA connections than Rankin. The Russian-born de Mohrenschildt was part of the “White Russian” (i.e. anti-communist/USSR) émigré community in Dallas that took care of the newly arrived Oswalds, seeing to their living arrangements and finding work for Lee.

Ruth Paine and her husband Michael aided Oswald and his wife in Dallas. And Ruth, a Quaker, shared her home with Marina and her two young children in early 1963 when Lee was in New Orleans looking for work. [Warning! there's a major rabbit hole in Oswald's stay in the "Big Easy"! Ed.]. She also found Oswald a job at the Texas School Book Depository where Oswald’s sixth-floor “sniper’s nest” was located.² It should be noted that Ruth had family members working at the CIA and Michael’s family had similar familial connections to the spy agency. So, the question: Were Ruth and Michael CIA “assets”, used from time to time by the agency? Were they ‘handlers’ of Oswald, used to support him as he was shunted from one set of “spooks” to the next, bringing him ever-closer to Kennedy’s orbit and that fatal day in November of 1963?

🐇 JUST ONE MORE ODDITY in this complex story that I’ll mention (there are many more!) was Oswald’s apparent trip in late September 1963 to Mexico City where someone identifying themselves as “Lee H. Oswald” contacted both the Soviet and Cuban Embassies trying to get visas to travel to Cuba and then to the USSR. Did real-Oswald spend a week in Mexico City as part of a plan to flee Dallas following the assassination or was fake-Oswald attempting to link real-Oswald’s future crime to Cuban or Soviet origins. Recall, there was considerable animosity toward the Soviet Union and communist Cuba at the time, and a war with Cuba or even the USSR would suit the MIC agendas of war profiteering and global hegemony. And Kennedy was seen as an impediment to such plans. The president was becoming a roadblock the Deep State needed to get around. THE THESIS of a “fake” Oswald in Mexico City is more convincing to me than the Dallas or New Orleans³ fakes. Author James Douglass suggests there may be evidence that it was not Oswald who visited those two embassies in Mexico. I envision a cabal of intel/military/state department plotters debating and deciding to load onto their Oswald narrative—that he was a loner, a communist sympathizer, anti-Kennedy—the blame for the assassination with the Cubans or Soviets as the main perps, and Oswald being merely their 'hired gun'. Spooks like to have things nicely tied up in a bow, in this case after the assassination there was to be a dead Oswald, and the Soviets or Cubans fingered as the brains behind the operation. 

[One thing the Warren Commission shied away from was making any connection between Kennedy's death and the USSR, something that might prove dangerous, in terms of escalation and heating up the cold war. If the Deep State actors who planned and plotted Kennedy's assassination couldn't have Russia or Cuba blamed as the brains behind the operation, at least they could have a dead-end to the investigation with Oswald out of the picture. Ed.]

 

HONESTLY, I like the idea that Oswald was a bamboozled innocent, led around by spook handlers and set up as the fall guy. That he was not the assassin, as James Douglass proposes; that he did not fire on Kennedy’s motorcade that day; that he didn’t hate Kennedy; that he was following orders by unknown persons to be at the Book Depository then to go to the Texas Theatre; that he didn’t murder Officer Tibbit⁴ along the way. Was Lee Oswald tricked into believing he was on some other kind of mission—perhaps even to save Kennedy?  Recall, the under-reported story about a Chicago assassination plot, just weeks before Kennedy's fateful Dallas tour, that was foiled when a man telephoned authorities, identifying himself as “Lee” and warned of the murderous plot set for Kennedy’s November 2 visit to the city. The Secret Service cancelled Kennedy’s trip based on what they, the FBI and the police uncovered in their investigations. Oswald as "a patsy" is a compelling narrative. And if Kennedy was killed by unidentified gunmen, then a big bull’s eye was painted on Oswald at the same time.

 

🐇 So, was Oswald the lone gunman? Did he fire those three fateful bullets into Kennedy’s motorcade? Perhaps. Was there a fourth bullet fired by someone else from the infamous “grassy knoll”? Possibly. But, it is unlikely we’ll ever know for sure, even when the last tranche of Kennedy files is released (if ever). But the documented instances of spooks in Oswald’s life—for years—suggests he was an “asset” of the spy agencies, available for use by rogue elements as they plotted to assassinate their president and pin the blame on other actors. (Russia, Cuba, Cuban exiles, "the mob")  Conspiracy or fact? The jury’s still out.      

 

Cheers, Jake. ___________________________________________

 

* Ruth Paine is credited for getting Oswald a job at the Texas School Book Depository in early October. Conspiracy critics say that neither Paine nor Oswald would have known that Kennedy's motorcade route would run through Dealy Plaza, where the limousine  needed to slow down negotiating a sharp left-hand turn. Critics say that travel plans for Kennedy's entourage had not even been made at that point. But if it had been planned, perhaps months earlier by the Secret Service (which is tasked with presidential security), then leaks of the parade route must have come from them or from Dallas authorities who would have been in the loop. That information would then have been passed on to Ruth Paine who secured Oswald's position at the Book Depository giving him an ideal spot to construct his "sniper's nest" on the sixth-floor. 

Note: Ruth may not have known the reason she was tasked with getting Oswald a job there. She, like Oswald, may have been "useful idiot" moved about the chessboard by hidden actors.

  

1. The ARRB released a tranche of previously redacted Kennedy assassination files in 1992, holding back a final batch for another 25 years until 2017 when President Trump allowed the release of 19,000 files. However, there remains an undetermined number of files still locked away. Though Trump promised to release all the Kennedy files, he changed his mind, holding back those deemed “too sensitive” to national security. He ordered the release of the remaining files be made in 2021. The Biden administration released an additional 13,000 files, leaving roughly 5,000 in the vault, again for ‘national security’ purposes. What is in the remaining files and when will they be released is anyone’s guess.     

 

2. For another twist down this rabbit hole, note that there was a little-reported earlier assassination plot. Douglass provides information that on Kennedy’s upcoming tour of Chicago on November 2, four Cuban exiles (who hated Kennedy because of his decision not to send U.S. forces into Cuba following the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion) were planning to murder him as he rode in his motorcade along the proposed parade route into the city. A tip from someone calling himself “Lee” alerted authorities to the plot, but the Secret Service, along with the police and FBI managed let the gunmen ‘slip’ through their fingers. It is also interesting that one Thomas Valee, an unstable “loner” and brain-damaged Korean War vet who publicly threatened to kill Kennedy in the weeks prior to the president's scheduled visit to the Windy City, was on hand. Valee, a skilled marksman, seemed like strong “patsy”  material in a  situation mirroring the one Oswald found himself in Dallas a few weeks later.

 

3. OMG! Don’t get me started on Oswald’s time in New Orleans where he was ostensibly looking for work. There were so many spooks floating around that it was hard to walk down a sidewalk without tripping over one! Mega rabbit hole! Or the rushed autopsy at  Parkland Memorial Hospital, the missing notes taken by medical staff at the time observing and recording the injuries Kennedy sustained. 

Or, how come the Dallas police, in two days of interviewing Oswald, took no notes or kept no audio recordings of their conversations with the man at the centre of one of the great crimes of the Twentieth-Century. WTF!? YGTBKM!! 🤯

 

4. Officer Tibbit was shot when he attempted to question Oswald (real or otherwise) because he fit the description in a police BOLO (“be on the lookout”) following Kennedy’s murder.  

 

👉FOR A SHARP BIT of political satire see Seinfeld’s classic spoof of the “single bullet” theory (dubbed by skeptics the “magic bullet”) that made its way into the 1964 Warren Commission’s report on the assassination of President Kennedy. The NBC comedy sketch was aired February 12, 1992, in an episode entitled “The Boyfriend”. The scene features actor Wayne Knight (“Newman!”) who’d also appeared in the movie JFK, directed by Oliver Stone, a year earlier. The Seinfeld TV episode spoofs the movie’s courtroom re-enactment of the Kennedy shooting which called into question the veracity of the “single bullet” theory. Instead of a bullet, the Seinfeld skit centers around the impossible gyrations of "one magic loogie!"  😆

In 1964, the Warren Commission adopted the “single bullet” scenerio in its deliberations which concluded that John Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally were struck by the same bullet. This fits the scenario of Lee Oswald having fired three bullets from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, Texas, killing the president and wounding Connally, and where three empty shell casings were found. Evidence of a fourth bullet fired at the presidential motorcade would suggest there was a second shooter and a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. [The “single bullet” hypothesis is one of the most controversial findings of the Warren Report and remains contested to this day. Ed.]   

SEINFELD EPISODE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl-Qp8RPOtI

OLIVER STONE’S JFK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwFIOPMBzqI If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, check out the courtroom scene near the end where District Attorney for New Orleans Jim Garrison (portrayed by Kevin Costner) demonstrates to the jury the likelihood there was more than one shooter in the Kennedy assassination by debunking the "magic bullet"/lone shooter narrative. The 1991 movie is based on Garrison’s real-life probing into the dark truths surrounding the 1963 assassination.

IN 1969, Garrison brought an unsuccessful court action against businessman Clay Shaw, claiming he was part of a conspiracy to murder the American president. The movie, JFK, is based on his investigations and follows the twists and turns Garrison and his prosecution team make going down what is arguably last century’s most audacious rabbit hole.

 

THE MOVIE, EXECUTIVE ACTION: is a fictional account of Kennedy’s assassination from the perspective of a cabal of wealthy elites who saw the president as a threat to their power and affluence and conspired to murder him. The 1973 film has a great cast: Robert Ryan, Burt Lancaster, and Will Geer, as well as an edgy and unrelenting portrayal of one of the most heinous crimes ever committed in the United States.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK2jxL7SBf4&t=29s

 

👉I've already suggested who I feel planned and orchestrated Kennedy's murder, here. Just how much Oswald knew and what actions he took in Dallas that fall day in 1963 have yet to be conclusively determined. He may have fired those three bullets including the "magic bullet", and later killed Officer Tibbit. There may or may not have been a second shooter. But, there most probably was a wider conspiracy behind it all. 

 

 

Douglass, James, W. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he Died and Why it Matters. Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 2008.

 

 

 

 

RANT: A MADMAN'S OLYMPICS!

 

IN HONOUR OF the Winter Olympics being held in Italy this week, I thought I would give my choices for medal winners for a conflict, country or action that is most likely to lead to a nuclear war in our not-so-distant future. Here goes:

 

BRONZE:

Third-place winner of the coveted trophy for civilizational extinction goes to the massive idiot currently president of our great neighbour to the south, Donald J. Trump, who so needs validation of any kind that he’ll scarf down like a box of chocolates the Nobel Peace Prize medallion gifted to him from Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado.*

President Trump wins third-place on the podium for his “Golden Dome” missile defence project, which the Congressional Budget Office projects a cost ranging from $161-billion to a whopping $542-billion over 20 years, and if acted upon will become an enormous black hole, sucking up the dwindling treasure of the American empire, and for all that, is doomed to fail because the physics doesn’t add up.

 

“Intercepting even a single, nuclear-armed intercontinental-range ballistic missile or its warheads . . . is extremely challenging,” said physicist Frederick Lamb, chair of the APS study group. “The ability of any missile defense system to do this reliably has not been demonstrated.” (z.me.science.com)

 

THE REASON ICBMS ARE SO DIFFICULT to intercept, beside their speed, is because they can ‘change’ from launch time to ground zero. Ballistic missiles of this nature, carrying nuclear payloads, sufficiently large to have the moniker “city killers”, applied to them, operate in three phases. The first is the “boost phase”, when the missile lifts off from its silo, mobile launcher, submarine or warship, gathering speed for around five minutes until the booster rocket burns-out and disengages from the second-stage delivery module that holds the munitions. This second or “mid-course” phase, lasts roughly twenty minutes, and during which time the warhead is released from the delivery module. [Note: Each delivery module may contain several warheads. Ed.] The warhead arcs through space above the earth’s atmosphere where there is no air friction to slow it down. Speeds of up to 24,000 km/hr can be reached here. The third phase, the “terminal phase”, begins as the warhead reaches the apogee of its arc and begins to fall, rapidly, increasing in speed as gravity take hold, until the warhead detonates at “ground zero”. Speeds of up to 29,000 km/hr. can be achieved in this final phase which last mere minutes! Note that the missile and warheads travel ballistically, that is unpowered, since the booster rockets were jettisoned at the end of the launch phase. Hence the "B" in ICBM. Think of a softball lobbed in from left field to the catcher’s mitt. Same thing, except for the megatons.

 
BUT I SAID ICBMs change during their flight, making them harder to shoot down. In the second, mid-course phase, the warhead is still inside the missile’s “delivery module”. This second stage of the rocket contains one, perhaps several warheads, along with some surprises. Each warhead is equipped with jets on its sides to steer the munition to an individual target other than the main target at the terminal or nadir of the ICBM's journey. 

THE 'CHANGE' I MENTIONED occurs at this stage of an incoming ICBM when multiple warheads, along with dummy warheads, “chaff”, even balloons and debris are released, along with the “city killer” munitions, all traveling at the same speed--thousands of kilometers per hour, with the 'surprises' disguising the real munitions. Because there is no air to slow or destabilize their flight, the surprises continue gathering speed, along with their megaton buddies, until their downward arc brings them into contact with the atmosphere. Some burn up upon reentry, but all cause ground radar and satellite imagery no end of trouble as technicians try to distinguish warheads from chaff. If it were possible to intercept and destroy an ICBM in its launch phase and perhaps in the mid-course of its arc, it is well-nigh impossible to interdict a descending ICBM during its terminal phase, given the speeds it achieves in the minutes or seconds before it detonates over ground zero.

 

    Hoooweeee! Hot dang! I gotta get me some of those!

IT IS IMPORTANT to understand that Early Warning detection systems use ground-based radars and satellite imagery [See Ted Postol’s explainer, here] to track a missile's launch and trajectory. The launch, say, of a Russian ICBM would be captured by satellite cameras because of the tell-tale exhaust plumes it expels as it is ground-launched, the rocket appearing to the satellite's camera as brighter than the surrounding landscape, and with characteristics well-known to alert ground-based radar operators who track the ascending missile which will be at its slowest speed and is most vulnerable to anti-missile (ABM) attacks. However, it is in its boost phase for only a few minutes, and can possibly be shot down by an ABM missile if the defensive array is close enough to the launch site. More on this in a bit.

  

WE NOW HAVE A PICTURE of an incoming ICBM surrounded by decoys and chaff. For high-altitude ABMs to launch and literally crash into the falling angel of death ICBM missile or else explode near to it and damage the ICBM with shrapnel, they must first distinguish between real and fake warheads. They can’t shoot down everything in the sky. 👉A demonstration of how difficult this can be is to take a piece of construction paper and perforate it with dozens of small holes, say the size of your ballpoint pen nib. Then place the construction paper on an overhead projector and turn it on. You should see a dark background with dozens of tiny holes. That’s what radars see in the downward arc of a modern ICBM, coming in at ten-or-fifteen-thousand km/hr and only minutes to decide what 'dot' to target. And that’s just one incoming missile! Modern ICBMs are equipped with multiple warheads, each of which come with their own surprises to fool defence radars and satellite arrays.

 

THE BEST TIME to shoot down an ICBM would be during its launch phase when it is traveling slower, and doesn't have camouflaging chaff accompanying it. But if the ABM launcher is sited too far from the launching ICBM, it will never be able to intercept the missile in time.

SO, LONG STORY LONGER than I wanted (sorry about that), Trump's “Golden Dome” won’t work as advertised (like his casinos). There would be too much chaff or simply too many incoming warheads for the system to fulfill it’s stated purpose, namely the absurd notion of shielding the entire continental United States from a nuclear attack.¹

I’LL JUST BRIEFLY NOTE that the Americans already have “layered” ABM defence systems with specific missile batteries configured to launch anti-missile missiles during each stage of an attacking ballistic missile (boost, mid-course, terminal), but their effectiveness is sketchy. THAAD, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) with its anti-missile array, was used in the recent so-called Twelve-Day War, where an enormous amount of detection, data processing and communications coordination is needed to ‘mesh’ the layers together tightly enough to create a seamless defence barrier against potential, incoming nukes. Ronald Regan’s 1980s’ Strategic Defence Initiative (AKA “Star Wars”) had the same goal—to protect the United States from a nuclear attack. It was an idea whose time had not yet come forty years ago, and Trump’s “Golden Dome” is idea whose time has also not yet come. Not by a longshot. 

 

RECALL THAT PRESIDENT TRUMP CREATED in his first term in office the “Space Force” wing of the American military, which sounded lame and ‘Star Trekkie’ to me at the time. What would the newly enlisted starship troopers do? To that point, there’s scuttlebutt around that Trump wants to create an armada of satellites to not only monitor threats and coordinate data on potential missile launches, but also to establish space-based satellite platforms for “kinetic” attacks and "pulse weapons" that would be used as part of the Golden Dome's ABM defence network. And presumably the new Space Force will play a significant role. However, costs are prohibitive, with some analysts suggesting that ten-thousand satellites would be needed just to monitor the continental United States and it's any ones guess as to how many satellites equipped with ABMs would be needed to support the Golden Dome's ground-based, anti-ballistic missile batteries.  This could very easily lead to the weaponization of space, even with nukes!😱 Long-term, the effectiveness of the system to counter novel missile arrays and countermeasures from ICBM-possessing adversaries is questionable. This new emphasis on using space-based observation satellites and 'attack' satellites to create a impenetrable barrier to any and all ICBM (and cruise missiles, bombers, etc.) is dangerous, as we shall see. 

“Golden Dome would require massive con­stellations to locate and destroy missiles…Trump’s goal of reliably intercepting hundreds or even a thousand or more Russian and Chinese missiles would likely require tens of thousands of satellites.”  (zemescience.com)

 

THERE’S MORE MEAT TO THIS MATTER but for now I’ll summarize how much of cockup (and how dangerous!) Trump’s plan is to build an overly robust ABM system. First, we should all remember the old maxim, “The best laid schemes ‘o mice anʽ men gang aft aglay.” 

 

👉Another point to consider is a matter of history, the 2001 decision by the Bush administration to opt out of the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) treaty with Russia, leaving the US free to develop ABMs to supposedly defend against potential ICBM attacks from “rogue” nations like North Korea and Iran. Russia saw this as a threat when the United States began preparations to site AGEIS missile arrays in Poland and Romania, ostensibly to counter incoming missiles from Iran. GMAFB! The Russian government expressed concerns that such sites, with such arrays, could easily be reconfigured to host offensive, nuclear-armed missiles aimed at Russia, only minutes away from Moscow. The Kremlin’s concerns went unheeded. 

 

SO, OVER the course of the next decade, Russia developed ‘work-a-rounds’ to counter missile threats so close to their homeland that could also penetrate with their speed and maneuverability ABM arrays sited in the continental USA by bringing online a new family of hyper-sonic missiles which could potentially take out nearby NATO installations and bypass any defensive systems available to the United States.

America made a bet that it could develop a system that was robust enough to blunt incoming ICBMs—to ward off a first strike by Russia, for example, or if America struck Russia first with nukes (not an impossibility as things stand today) it would then  rely on its Golden Dome to stave off a nuclear retaliation from Russia. As it stands, America is holding a losing hand. The solution is not some mythical 'shield' that will only act to destabilize the strategic balance of power which relied on a certain level of transparency, communication, and as little 'surprise' as possible. One pillar of this structure was the NewSTART treaty which capped the number of deployed warheads and launch vehicles, including strategic bombers. Transparency in the treaty was achieved with another treaty called "Open Skies" which allowed US and Russian aircraft to fly over designated air strips observing the other country's strategic bombers as they sat--in the open--so their number could be verified. Recall last year when the Zelensky regime targeted Russian strategic bombers as they sat exposed, as per NewSTART treaty regulations, and how much of a dumfuk episode that was. Now, there are no nuclear weapons treaties left, transparency is fading and trust is vanishing. Good job, everyone!

 

POINT IS, as Newton wrote centuries ago: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” And now that there’s no strategic arms treaties at all between the United States and Russia, there is the dangerous possibility of a nuclear arms race.² It’s called going up the “escalation ladder” where one side does something and the other side reacts in kind. Back and forth they go as the first one escalates, then the other does likewise. Then it's onward and upward the two nuclear powers climb until...? 

 

INSTEAD of working to tamp down the atomic threat, these moves by the Trump administration to opt out of treaties and push against the boundaries of decades-old Great Power management regimes with respect to nuclear weapons, something that probably saved everyone's bacon in the decades following WWII. It's called deterrence. 

👉UP UNTIL THIS LAST DECADE or so, countries, principally the United States and Russia, made strategic decisions based on deterrence. Each assumed the other’s nuclear arsenal would be sufficient to kill them--no matter who launched first, the return fire would kill the primary aggressor. In other words, it would be mad to start a nuclear conflict with another nuclear power. [That's pretty obvious, sensi. Ed.😉] Both would be destroyed. Mutually Assured Destruction—the MAD principle was in force for decades, even at the end of the Cold War. The threat of nuclear war was sobering to those who grew up under the shadow of The Bomb. Now, not so much.

 

TRUMP’S PLOY to make the United States invulnerable to ICBM missiles (and the whole panoply of missiles, bombs and drones) not only destabilizes the deterrence principle that has kept nuclear powers from launching or threatening to launch against one another. And this pipe dream of Trumps, this bid to create an impenetrable shield  is dangerous because it spurs the development of novel nuclear warhead delivery systems like Russia's hyper-sonic Oreshniks and stealthy Poseidon torpedoes, as well as expanding their nuclear stockpiles to be better equipped to overwhelm such defences with more and more nukes. One step up the escalatory ladder begets another step up by a competitor, then another and another until….?

 

SO THE BRONZE MEDAL for bringing us closer to our civilization's destruction than we've ever been goes to Donald Trump who, though he doesn’t get the gold (again), is doing his darndest to bring down boundaries and guardrails that, however imperfect they may be, have nevertheless kept the atomic genie inside the bottle, lo these years. So it goes. 

 

CHEERS, JAKE.

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* Ms. Machado and other ‘bad picks’ for the Nobel Peace Prize aside, if the award gets any cheaper, they may have to install the medallions with GPS trackers, so they won’t get lost, or land-filled, or accidentally tossed out with old bowling trophies and public-speaking awards won by NPP laureates and their children. Just say’in.

P.S. Didn’t I read somewhere that Machado was seen in Washington wearing a T-shirt that says: “I went all the way to Oslo and all I got was a lousy million bucks!"?

 

1.  But what about brain-eating zombie hordes!? How will the dome protect us from those? Why is no one talking about this?

 

2. As for China: It is a recognized nuclear weapons state under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); it has signed (but not ratified) the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT); it is, however, a signatory to the Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone (NWFZ) treaty; it has not signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TTNW); but has adopted a "no first use" of nuclear weapons doctrine (since 1964); at this time, China opposes joining any trilateral arms control negotiations with the U.S. and Russia, which is just as well, considering the United States just blew off extending NewSTART (Strategic Arms Treaty) with Russia which expired 5 February 2026. This treaty had been in place since the Cold War and was highly successul in reducing the nuclear weapons stockpiles of the United States and Russia.

[Worringly, China has announced, also recently, that it is adding additional ICBM missile silos for its nuclear arsenal and will begin a build-out of its nuclear warhead stocks. Buckle up! Ed.]  

 

[STAY TUNED FOR THE SILVER AND BRONZE MEDAL WINNERS COMING SOON TO  A GROUND ZERO NEAR YOU. Ed.]