There’s always that possibility that America could launch the first strike. If we’re looking at the sheer numbers, then America has a proven track record of being a first striker, being an aggressor, Adam Garrie, managing editor at The Duran told RT.
According to Garrie, this is a colossal waste of money and effort, which could be better spent on other ventures.
Amidst the dangerous standoff between Washington and Pyongyang, with both sides upping the rhetoric to dangerous levels, many Americans, fearing the worst from their leader, Donald Trump, are spending money buying bomb shelters in the event things take a dramatic turn for the worse between the two nuclear powers.
RT: Sales of nuclear shelters are at all-time high. Does this represent a genuine fear among people, or is it just savvy business people cashing in on the media hysteria?
Adam Garrie: Well, it’s about latching onto a commercial trend and trying to make the best of it. What better way to sell umbrellas then to say constantly that ‘it’s going to rain,’ whether you have the knowledge of that or not. The truth is that if nuclear war was going to happen, most of these shelters that are being sold at local shops and on-line are about as valuable to the people who are buying them as a headache pill is to a man … who died of a gunshot wound to the head. These things are really not worth the money.
If people were really concerned about nuclear fallout and the real dangers of a non-lethal but in the long-term very deadly nuclear incident, they ought to be focusing on Ukraine, a country that is already three years behind its nuclear safety checks and the stations it claims to be upgrading, very inadequately according to some safety officials, that won’t be done until the year 2020, by which time many say they will not be fit for purpose by international standards. But nobody is talking about that very real prospect of a ‘Chernobyl 2.0’ in the very place where the original incident happened in the 1980s. But a lot of people who know about commercial marketing … they are cashing in on the North Korean crisis.
Russia has said that North Korea’s missiles cannot even reach the United States; these are intermediate-range missiles, they are not ICBMs, as both Washington and Pyongyang have said. Washington and Pyongyang both have a vested interest in saying these are ICBMs, apparently so do people in the United States selling these bomb shelters. The truth is that the people in the region of North Korea would suffer the most in the event of a nuclear attack. The people in the United States, certainly in the immediate term, would be safe. But the lesson here isn’t to go out and invest in bomb shelters, the lesson is for the American people to tell their government to stop threatening other countries, whether it’s Venezuela, North Korea, Syria… The US should concentrate on itself as all countries are and frankly as North Korea has since 1953.
RT: Do people genuinely believe the world is just a few of Trump's tweets away from nuclear war?
AG: There’s always that possibility that America could launch the first strike. If we’re looking at the sheer numbers, leaving both personalities on both sides, then America is a country with a proven track record of being a first striker, being an aggressor. Look what they did to Iraq illegally, to Yugoslavia illegally. Look at the brutal Hillary Clinton engineered war on Libya in 2011. Look at how the United States more or less invented al-Qaeda when they funded the mujahedin that was fighting the secular, Soviet-aligned government in Kabul throughout the 1980s. The list goes on and on. We can look at CIA coups against legitimate leaders, from Chile to Iran.
So when it comes to the sheer statistics of America launching a war, things don’t look very good. But luckily, since 1945, America hasn’t dropped more nuclear weapons. And we have to remember, since we’re talking about the stats and the figures, that America is the only nation to ever drop an atomic weapon in wartime. So yes, things are dangerous, but with any hope China and Russia and other responsible parties can implement their peace plan, which calls for de-escalation on both sides. In any case, I can’t see that these contraptions that people are buying from their local hardware shops and on-line retailers are going to do any good should Trump push the button.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.