US NORTHCOM Commanding General Tells Congress U.S. Policy is not to Defend America Against Russian and Chinese Nuclear Missile Attack

Exposing the madness and irretrievably flawed assumptions surrounding the U.S. nuclear strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction which serve to greatly increase the risks of nuclear attack

(Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story mistakenly attributed this quote to General Cotton who commands U.S. Strategic Command. This version has been corrected to attribute this statement to General Van Herck who made the statement at the same HASC Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing held on March 8th)

Exposing the Madness of MAD

During a Strategic Forces congressional hearing earlier this week, General Glen VanHerck, the commanding general of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) made an astounding statement which was not reported by U.S. media. He stated “First to be clear, our missile defense today does not, from a policy perspective, defend against Russia or China.” General VanHerck made news last month when he stated he could not rule out extraterrestrials when it came to the three unidentified flying objects shot down by the USAF last month. When asked about the possibility of alien activity, VanHerck said he will "let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out," adding that he hasn't "ruled out anything at this point.”

The reason General VanHerck’s explosive revelation that the US policy is not to shoot down incoming Russian or Chinese nuclear missiles is not considered newsworthy is that it is essentially a restatement of America’s nuclear doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). The aptly named Western theory of MAD is without a doubt the most certifiably irrational national security strategy America has ever adopted in its history. The U.S. nuclear strategy of MAD, in effect, risks making nuclear war more likely because it prevents us from being able to defend ourselves against even a relatively limited nuclear strike and therefore serves as a powerful disincentive against responding to even a limited nuclear strike in kind, emboldening our enemies to commit nuclear aggression to win wars. MAD is also exceptionally dangerous in that it essentially offers a single course of action in the event of a nuclear attack which is a full retaliatory response.

For over half a century, U.S. leaders have indoctrinated the American people in the false belief that the best way to deter enemy nuclear missile attack is to ensure that the U.S. remains defenseless against it. This insane and illogical theory was first articulated by Donald Brennan, a strategist working in Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute in 1962 and was largely embraced and adopted by then U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara shortly thereafter. The theory postulated that so long as each side had a guaranteed second-strike retaliatory capability able to destroy the other that neither nuclear superpower would dare launch a nuclear first strike as that would amount to national suicide. The problem is that the theory’s logic only holds if both sides maintain a robust and survivable nuclear triad and maintain rough nuclear parity which the U.S. has not done for the past dozen years or so.