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.

 _____________________________________      

* 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.]

 

 

RANT: ELEPHANTS NEVER FORGET. WHY DO WE?

IN GAZA, 529 Palestinians have been killed and around 1600 wounded by IDF bombs, bullets and missiles since the October 2025 ‘ceasefire’ went into effect, which is to say we must assume the term “ceasefire” has a different meaning in Hebrew. 

SO, last December, Israel decertified 37 non-profit agencies from operating in Gaza including Oxfam, Care International, and the Norwegian Refugee Council because their paperwork wasn’t up to snuff with new regulations requiring detailed staff information be provided to uncover any Hamas operatives embedded within the various NGOs. This past Sunday, Israel banned Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) for the same reason and the organization is required to leave the enclave by the end of February. Before it would give detailed staff lists to Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which oversees dealings with humanitarian organizations operating in Gaza and the West Bank, MSF requested Tel Aviv provide, “secure assurances to ensure the safety of our staff or the independent management of our operations.”  Which is a reasonable enough request considering 1,700 health staff have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces since 7 October 23. Israel refused.

 

“Humanitarian conditions remain extreme: nearly 530 people have been killed since October, basic services including food, water, shelter, healthcare, fuel, and livelihoods have been largely destroyed, and the health system is nearly non-functional, with many specialised services, such as burn care, unavailable.” (MSF)

 

    "GENOCIDE? WHAT GENOCIDE?

SINCE THE START of the genocide and ethnic cleansing that began after 7 October 2023, over 71,000 Gazans have died as a direct result of Israel’s aggression, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry figures, and more than 171,000 have been wounded. These figures do not account for deaths occurring because of degraded medical facilities, diseases from unsanitary living conditions and inadequate access to clean water, exposure to the elements (with the majority of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents displaced from their homes and forced to live in tents or out in the open), or from a lack of food. This figure also does not take into consideration the estimated 10,000 Palestinians buried beneath the rubble, their remains unrecoverable because Israel does not allow heavy earth-moving equipment into Gaza. I think a figure of well over one-hundred-thousand deaths caused by the Israeli siege and blockade is my guess, though there are some commentators who think it could be considerably higher. But a genocide is more than numbers. It's also intention--the plans made by the perpetrators against their captive population is also an indication of this ultimate war crime. It's called genocidal intent. I won’t bother quoting the hateful and and unhinged comments made by Israeli politicians since 7 October. We’ve all heard them. We know what they want to do. We know where this is going. I will remind readers that polls show a majority of Israeli Jews (almost 75%) agree with the policies of the Netanyahu government.* Unbelievable!

LAST YEAR, the world watched as hundreds of thousands of Gazans were on the brink of starvation. In July 2025, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) issued a report stating there was famine in Gaza. The IPC stated that 266 Gazans had starved to death since 7 October 2023 including over 100 children and infants, and “[n]early 55,500 malnourished pregnant and breastfeeding women require urgent help.” (care.ca)

👉BY THE SUMMER of 2025, world opinion, and in the United States as well, turned decidedly against the Netanyahu regime and its sadistic blockade of the Palestinian enclave and deliberate starvation and immiseration of its people. Israel was forced to let in more humanitarian aid and food by the fall. Recall that Israel had banned UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) food aid activities in Gaza in January 2025, citing the UN agency harboured Hamas militants in its work force. It was a claim with little evidence provided. Recall, also, that Israel, along with its patron, the United States, set up its own aid network some month later, the short-lived Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) which failed miserably (or succeeded depending on your point of view) in delivering adequate food aid to the starving Palestinian population. The compromised, IDF-linked NGO failed so badly--some say deliberately--that PM Netanyahu was forced to open the gates and allow NGOs still on the ground access to incoming humanitarian aid. The American president Donald Trump was probably instrumental, here, in reining-in the Israelis, at least temporarily, as a condition of his so-called October 2025 ‘ceasefire’ plan. However, today there is still inadequate humanitarian aid entering Gaza with only 29,000 food and fuel trucks out of a total of 66,000 stipulated under the ceasefire agreement. Israel allows in less than half the necessary humanitarian aid to properly feed and shelter the Gazan population. Shameful! Under international law, as the occupying power, Israel is obliged to provide the necessities of life to a subject population under its jurisdiction. 

 

👉AS IT STANDS, the daily death toll in Gaza from Israeli bombs and missiles is less than before the ceasefire but they remain an all-too-frequent occurrence. Vacating Gaza of its Palestinian population is still the goal of the Israeli government and its military. They have destroyed most of the enclave’s infrastructure, and while Gaza City is relatively intact, Israel continues destruct it building by building. 

👉Since the ceasefire there has been less media attention, yet the suffering of Palestinians continues. They are now confined to over-crowded, ill-serviced conditions on about 45% of the land they once occupied.  IDF troops are stationed in the other half of Gaza they captured during the conflict and in all probability will never vacate. They have no ability to earn their living, to fish, farm, cultivate orchards, raise livestock or operate small businesses. They are in a ghetto, fully dependant on outside assistance and the walls are closing in. As I mentioned, humanitarian aid is far from adequate, medical services are struggling, infrastructure is triaged, and it’s only a matter of time before Israel finds an excuse to ramp up the violence. 

👉The world may be distracted by other events these days (there are so many!). But, rest assured, Israeli politicians and military planners are not.

 

“Israel has succeeded, to a dangerous degree, in systematically dehumanizing Palestinians through mass killing. Once violence reaches genocidal proportions, lesser – yet still deadly – violence becomes normalized. The slow death of survivors becomes background noise.

This is how Palestinians are killed twice: first through genocide, and then through erasure – through silence, distraction, and the gradual withdrawal of attention from their ongoing collective suffering.” (Baroud. anti-war.com)

 

  

CHEERS, JAKE. ___________________________________ 

 

* It's shocking to think that a majority of Jewish Israelis support the policies of Bibi Netanyahu's government despite the growing global oprobrium such criminal actions engender for the Levantine state. I have said before, the poll is indicitive of a psychological ill society. We've seen what happens when people see other people as  less than human.  The irony here, as many of you no doubt feel as well, is sickening.