Russian nuclear threats escalate, target Britain
Russian state-owned media personality Dmitry Kiselyov threatens to “plunge Britain into the depths of the ocean” with radioactive tsunami.
The Anglophilic Anglican is appalled and angry! If there is anyone out there who still thinks Russia holds even an iota of moral high ground in the current war, I strongly urge you to watch this, and hopefully re-think the notion. The UK Daily Mail reports:
Irish lawmakers have reacted with fury after Russian state media urged Putin to wipe Great Britain off the map with a giant tidal wave, destroying Ireland in the process. Dmitry Kiselyov, known as “Putin’s mouthpiece,” used his Sunday night show [on Russia’s state-owned and operated Channel 1] to call for attacks on Britain with a Poseidon underwater drone that he said would trigger a 1,600ft radioactive tidal wave and “plunge Britain to the depths of the ocean.”
Kiselyov suggested that an underwater detonation would result in a “nuclear tsunami” that would completely destroy the UK. “This tidal wave is also a carrier of extremely high doses of radiation,” he said. “Surging over Britain, it will turn whatever is left of them into radioactive desert, unusable for anything. How do you like this prospect?”
The latter account continues,
Officials have dismissed Kiselyov’s words as an empty threat, as a nuclear weapon would need to have 200,000 times that of the Tsar Bomba, one of the largest nuclear weapons ever created, to cause the kind of environmental impact that he describes. Even so, officials are keeping constant watch over Russia’s nuclear sectors.
“We continue to monitor their nuclear capabilities every day the best we can and we do not assess that there is a threat of the use of nuclear weapons and no threat to NATO territory,” a US official said in a statement last week.
Be that as it may, the very fact that they are talking like this – and again, bear in mind this is a state-run media outlet, so they are obviously doing so with the knowledge and approval of the Kremlin, and likely its encouragement, if not direction – gives an idea of the kind of people we are dealing with.
Such rhetoric would be incredibly irresponsible and morally abhorrent under any circumstances, but that they are raising this threat in the context of a war they started, an invasion of a sovereign nation that was not threatening them, and in their apparent rage and frustration that they’re doing incredibly poorly in that operation, and have successfully ticked off almost the entire rest of the world in the process (hey, at least they’re having one success, right?), makes them look even more like classic playground bullies who are gobsmacked that their victims a) are fighting back, and b) have strong friends.
Those who have followed my occasional posts over the last several months will have noted that I have moved from being, not precisely a Putin partisan, but at least someone with some sympathy for his concerns and aims, to being resolutely opposed to what he has inflicted on Ukraine, and on the world. Putin has in the past presented himself as what one U.S. official called a “rational actor”; but whether that was in fact the case or just a useful façade, the mask has cracked, now.
He has shamelessly used the (unfortunately very real) rise of “woke” Leftism and moral decadence in the West as cover and justification for his repressive, equally-totalitarian ideology; he has complained of NATO’s eastward expansion, while utterly failing to take responsibility for the reason for that expansion – that the post-Soviet states simply don’t trust Russia to be a good neighbor (and the Ukraine invasion has completely justified and confirmed those fears); and – perhaps most unforgivably of all, for a Cold War survivor like me – he has been willing to wield threats of the unimaginable horrors of nuclear war to try to frighten the West into backing down from resisting him. He has become despicable to me.
And the fact that his “mouthpiece” on Channel 1 can so glibly, even gleefully, talk about the nuclear obliteration of Britain for daring to oppose his invasion of Ukraine and thus to oppose, in the process, his ultimate goal of “an open Eurasia – from Lisbon to Vladivostok” (“open” defined as “Russian-controlled”), is the final nail in the proverbial coffin. Speaking of coffin: I understand he is going to be having cancer surgery. Perhaps he is dying, and so wouldn’t care who he takes down with him in a nuclear inferno. But I hope and pray that at least some of those around him have more sense!
As I say, if there are any reading this who still think he is in any way to be admired or defended, or that what Russia is doing in Ukraine (and beyond) is good and right, I hope you will rethink the notion. And do so forthwith!