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Russia Heightens Nuclear Threat
Special to the Fatima Network
 Russia
has hardened its line on the use of its nuclear arsenal making it easier to
press the nuclear button, while unequivocally declaring theWest a hostile
power that must be resisted.
This new
national security strategy, outlined in a 21-page military document, was
decreed by acting president Vladimir Putin on January 14. It was the first
foreign policy move that Putin has taken since replacing Boris Yeltsin in the
Kremlin on December 31, 1999.
The strategic
shift lowers the threshold at which Russia may resort to nuclear weapons. The
former strategy, decreed by Yeltsin in 1997, declared that nuclear weapons
could only be used "in the case of a threat to the very existence of the
Russian Federation as a sovereign state."
The new document
states that the use of nuclear weapons is necessary "to repel armed aggression
if all other means of resolving a crisis situation have been exhausted or turn
out to be ineffective."
Alexander Pikayev, at the Moscow office of the Carnegie Institute
told Agence France Presse "It's a marked change".
"The [1997] doctrine
in force until now" continued Pikayev, "said that Russia could strike first,
but only if another nuclear state attacked it or if its existence was
threatened."
The new document, by contrast, envisions using Russia's vast nuclear arsenal to
"repel armed aggressions". In other words, the Kremlin has officially approved
the use of nuclear weapons against conventional forces.
Various press reports
have noted the hostile tone of the new military document against theWest.
"Whereas the 1997 strategy spoke of ‘partnership' with theWest" reported
the London Guardian, "and decreed that there was no threat of military
aggression to Russia, the new paper says that two ‘mutually exclusive
tendencies' are now locked in combat on the globe."
The Guardian further
reported that Russian commentary on the leaked 21-page document said it made it
clear that "the term ‘partnership' has been consigned to the
past."
London's Daily Telegraph summed up the new threat stating that Putin's nuclear
policy raises a "Cold War ghost."
This is yet another demonstration that Russia has not
converted and that there still remains the urgent need for the Pope and the
bishops to consecrate Russia specifically and by name to the Immaculate Heart
of Mary as requested by Our Lady of Fatima.
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