Paul Craig Roberts -- Guest Column by Mikhail Gorbachev

Paul Craig Roberts -- Guest Column by Mikhail Gorbachev

“Reagan acted out of honest conviction and genuinely rejected nuclear weapons. Already during my first meeting with him in November of 1985, we were able to make the most important determination: “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” This sentence combined morals and politics — two things many consider to be irreconcilable. Unfortunately, the US has since forgotten the second important point in our joint statement — according to which neither America nor we will seek to achieve military superiority.” 

 Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, is an important historic personage. His liberalizing policies demonstrated that there were elements within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who possessed superior morality to that of some Western leaders. Gorbachev trusted too much the good side of humans and was betrayed by elements within the Soviet Union who took advantage of his liberalization to declare independence in behalf of their own power. Watching Soviet power fall away, hardline communists arrested Gorbachev in a coup. The result was the rise of Yeltsin who became an accomplice of the West.

Perhaps it is ironic that it was hardline communists who collapsed the Soviet Union. The Soviet collapse unleashed the neoconservative ideology, the most dangerous in history, that America won the Cold War and is anointed by History to exercise hegemony over the world.

This neoconservative fantasy has renewed the Cold War and is driving the world to nuclear armageddon.

This interview of Gorbachev by the German magazine, Spiegel, should be part of your education.

Mikhail Gorbachev: US Military an 'Insurmountable Obstacle to a Nuclear-Free World'

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/gorbachev-calls-for-nuclear-free-world-on-hiroshima-day-a-1046900.html

Interview Conducted by Joachim Mohr and Matthias Schepp

DPA/ USAF

An American nuclear missile facility in Montana: "This country would enjoy total military supremacy if nuclear weapons were abolished."

In a SPIEGEL interview, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev discusses morals and politics in the nuclear age, the crisis in Russian-American relations and his fear that an atomic weapon will some day be used.

SPIEGEL: Mikhail Sergeyevich, during your inaugural speech as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985, you warned of nuclear war and called for the "complete destruction of nuclear weapons and a permanent ban on them." Did you mean that seriously?

Gorbachev: The discussion about disarmament had already been going on for too long -- far too long. I wanted to finally see words followed by action because the arms race was not only continuing, it was growing ever more dangerous in terms of the number of weapons and their destructive capacity. There were tens of thousands of nuclear warheads on different delivery systems like aircraft, missiles and submarines.

SPIEGEL: Did you feel the Soviet Union was under threat during the 1980s by the nuclear weapons of NATO member states?

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