In September, when Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, sat down for nearly an hour in a private session with Donald Trump at the UN General Assembly, Zelensky asked for American Tomahawk missiles. Then, two days ago, on October 6th, Trump told reporters that before making a decision he wanted to clarify exactly how the Tomahawks would be used. “I think I want to find out what they’re doing with them,” Trump said, and “Where are they sending them?”

What was the presumable reason for Trump’s considering Tomahawks to Ukraine? Being buddies with Putin was not working. Rolling out the red carpet and schmoozing in Alaska in August for nearly three hours was not luring Putin to the negotiating table. It was not producing peace, much less a Nobel Peace Prize.
In fact, it produced attacks on Ukraine’s cities with 7,231 drones and 411 missiles since the Trump-Putin Alaska summit ended. The failure of the Alaska summit and the deliberation on Tomahawks led Russia’s most popular TV show host Vladimir Solovyov to say, “The period of candy and chocolates with Trump is now over. Will we now get the whip?” The whip is the Tomahawk.
The Russian press erupted over the Tomahawks with the usual threats. Solovyov, who is considered one of Trump’s voices, said he was “badly shaken by the idea of Tomahawks flying towards Moscow” and called for Russia to “completely obliterate all of Ukraine’s infrastructure” and send Kyiv back to “the stone age”. Another of Putin’s mouthpieces, Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president, former Russian prime minister, and Deputy Chairman of the Security Council, said the introduction of the Tomahawks could provoke a nuclear war. But these are threats we’ve been hearing for three years.

In September, Volodymyr Zelensky convinced Donald Trump that Russia was a paper tiger. Zelensky convinced Trump that, “If Russia were truly a military superpower, Ukraine would have fallen in three days.” In fact, Zelenskyy convinced Trump that Ukraine could utterly defeat Russia and could claw back the 20% of Ukraine that Russia now occupies.
But there are two big questions at work here. First off, the Kremlin is playing trump. It is trying to get back the hypnotic control it had over the president’s mind before president Trump’s September in-person talk with Volodymyr Zelensky. To accomplish this, Russia is laying blame for the fact that the Ukraine war is still raging on what it calls European “warmongers.” But, says Vladimir Putin, Trump is a man who will listen. So one big question is whether Putin’s magic sway over president Trump—the sway we saw in the Alaska summit– will work once again.
The other big question is why the Ukraine needs the Tomahawk at all. Ukraine’s own long-range autonomous aircraft, the FP-5 Flamingo, the UJ-26 Beaver, and the Antonov An-196 Fierce, have ranges as long and in some cases longer than the Tomahawk. And the Ukrainians flying weapons can carry nearly three times the explosive payload of a Tomahawk. For example, the Ukrainian Flamingo cruise missile carries a payload of 2,540 pounds, more than 2.5 times the payload of a Tomahawk.

But the Tomahawk can hug the land below the radar. It can zig and zag to make its way between hills and through meandering river valleys, and deliver its payload with a precision the Ukrainian drones can’t match. A precision that’s useful for taking out anti-aircraft weapons and military command centers.
So why did Ukraine’s Zelensky ask America’s President Trump for Tomahawk missiles when his own weapons were in many ways better? His sales pitch was that, “We need it, but it doesn’t mean that we will use it. Because if we will have it, I think it’s additional pressure on Putin to sit and speak.” In other words, to negotiate.
But there’s one more little hitch. Launching a Tomahawk takes American personnel. If an American soldier is killed by Russian fire, that may take us to a direct war with Russia. That would mean world war three. And world war three is exactly what Putin wants us to fear.
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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s new book is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Not to mention in scientific journals like Biosystems, New Ideas in Psychology, and PhysicaPlus. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute
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References:
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