The U.S. Quest for Nuclear Primacy: The Counterforce Doctrine and the Ideology of Moral Asymmetry

When I come to study in detail some of the arguments of these new military writers about nuclear war, I will necessarily have to adopt many aspects of their own methods and terminology, that is, I will have to meet them on the methodological ground of their own choosing. I want therefore to apologise in advance for the nauseating inhumanity of much of what I have to say.

—P. M. S. Blackett

John Bellamy Foster

The demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991 resulted in Washington declaring at that very moment that a new unipolar world order was being ushered in, with the United States now the sole superpower. The United States, supported by its NATO allies, immediately initiated a grand strategy of regime change or “naked imperialism” in the Balkans, the Middle East, northern Africa, and along the entire perimeter of the former Soviet Union. This was accompanied by the rapid expansion of NATO itself eastward into the former Warsaw Pact countries and regions previously part of the USSR. The pivotal goal in this expansion, as explained by former U.S. National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard, was to incorporate Ukraine into NATO, which would create the geopolitical and geostrategic conditions for the final overpowering and forced breakup of the Russian Federation.

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