Despite a seemingly cordial meeting Wednesday between Trump and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, tensions between the two countries remain high. Reports have come out in recent weeks (see here for instance) that Russian military officials are now convinced the US is planning a nuclear first strike against Russia.

Obviously we are in dangerous times. Articles demonizing Russia are churned out by the media each day. The deep state in Washington (which I would argue includes the owners or CEOs of the major media conglomerates) clearly is trying to incite and foment a conflict. Spreading chaos throughout the Middle East has been their modus operandi for many years now, but the ultimate chaos, of course, would be a nuclear war. And that very much seems to be their fondest fantasy and desire at present. Do they think they can win it? Possibly so. This is what the second article, by Conn Halinan, gets into.

The insanity has of course spread to the UK, where Defense Secretary Michael Fallon recently stated that under certain circumstances Theresa May’s government would consider launching a nuclear first strike–even if Britain was not under attack. Fallon’s idiocies are discussed in the third article, by Felicity Arbuthnot.

Interestingly, Arbuthnot also poses the possibility that the current showdown over North Korea is a “red herring.” While I’m not going to excerpt it, I will provide a link–here–to an analysis on the confrontation with North Korea published by Roberts just over a week ago.

The writer opines that the THAAD anti-missile system Trump is deploying to South Korea has nothing to do with North Korea, and is really intended to target China. A comparable analogy would be the US ballistic missile defense system deployed in Eastern Europe. That “missile shield” supposedly was to protect Europe from Iran, though most astute observers knew at the time that the real target was Russia. The system was first announced more than 10 years ago and finally went operational–in Romania–last year. The theory is that the shield now makes it possible for the US or NATO to carry out a surprise nuclear first strike against Russia, and then take out any Russian ICBMs which may be launched in  retaliation. THAAD will presumably give them the same capability with regard to China.