Stop the Immediate Danger of World War III!

It is high time to break the most dangerous taboo of the present: to know and act on the acute possibility, that mankind may be annihilated within days or weeks.
 
On the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world stands closer to the brink of thermonuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The Obama Administration and NATO have placed mankind in jeopardy of sudden extinction through a series of senseless provocations directed against Russia, primarily, and China second.
 
When the Iron Curtain came down, an understanding was reached that, in return for Soviet acceptance of German re-unification within NATO, there would be no further eastward expansion of NATO. Those who looked forward to a post-Cold War Europe of stability and cooperation, hoped that nations with potentially powerful industrial economies, such as Poland and then-Czechoslovakia, as well as—after the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union—Ukraine, would serve as a bridge between the European Union and an emerging Eurasian economic bloc.

All of those fundamental war-prevention agreements have now been violated. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, publicly boasted in December 2013 that the US had spent $5 billion on "color revolutions" to draw Ukraine into the European Union, and, eventually, into NATO.
 
The US unilaterally withdrew from the ABM Treaty in order to deploy a missile defense system in Eastern and Southern Europe, ostensibly aimed at Iran, but actually targeted at Russia. Last week, the Obama Administration confirmed this reality by announcing the deployment would go forward, despite the P5+1 deal with Iran. Russian officials have charged, all along, that the US unilateral BMD in Europe was part of a plan for a preemptive thermonuclear strike capability against Russia.
 
Deployment of that ABM system is well underway in Romania and Poland, and the first three ship-based AEGIS missile defense systems are already in place and have conducted maneuvers in the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, both bordering Russian territory.
 
Now reports have surfaced that the upcoming Trident Juncture 15 NATO exercises will include rehearsals of use of nuclear weapons against Russia. Washington is moving ahead with production and deployment of a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons, the B-61-12, which can reach targets inside Russian territory from F-35 stealth fighter jets. An estimated 500 of the B-61-12 nuclear weapons are to be produced, with current plans calling for about 200 of them to be deployed on continental Europe.
 
These unmistakable provocations have not gone unnoticed in the East and West. Since the onset of the Ukraine coup in November 2013, Russia has gone through major upgrading of its entire thermonuclear strategic force. Russian defense officials have publicly warned that they have developed and deployed an undefeatable nuclear second strike. To demonstrate this, Russian strategic bombers and submarines have engaged in exercises in international waters near NATO territories.
 
During the duration of the month of August, there is a grave danger of provocations against Russia by President Obama, who could use the occasion of the Congressional recess to launch a war. A wide range of influential figures has already voiced these concerns, including retired Russian and American flag officers.

The decision of Obama, to change the rules of engagement of the US Air Force in Syria without Congressional approval three days after Congress went into recess, bringing about the immediate danger of an escalation into a war against Syria, which the Congress voted against two years ago, underlines the acuteness of
the danger.
 
In 1914 the world was sleepwalking into the catastrophe. Today, with arsenals of thermonuclear weapons sufficient to extinguish civilization dozens of times over, the world is sleepwalking again to the abyss.
 
We, the undersigned, demand the immediate stop of the confrontation against Russia and China and a return to political solutions of all conflicts.

Schiller Instituttet    Contact the author of the petition