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The Organized Effort to Get Pope Leo 14th to Bring Trump, Putin and Xi, to a Summit, to Prevent a Nuclear War, WW3

26 August 2026, posted by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO3CprBPNPM

“Peter Kuznick: Entering the Age of Nuclear Wars”

26 August 2022, Peter Kuznick interviewed by Glenn Diesen

Welcome back. We are joined today by Peter Kuznick, professor of history and director of the nuclear studies institute at the American University. Uh also noteworthy is many people might know him from the [book and] 10-part or 12-part documentary series [he did] with Oliver Stone, called the “Untold History of the United States.” So, thank you for coming on the program. >> My pleasure, Glenn. >> So you've studied uh you spent, well, decades studying nuclear weapons and uh yeah the history of nuclear confrontation and you just led an appeal to Pope Leo regarding, convening an international summit uh due to the growing threat of nuclear war. Uh I was wondering if you could flesh out this argument. Why why do you think this is so critical at this point? >> Well, let me give a little background on this initiative. It was actually built upon Jack Gilroy. Jack Gilroy is an activist with Pax Christi and with Veterans for Peace, a longtime peace stalwart in the United States. And he drafted a letter to Archbishop Wester, who's the Archbishop for the Santa Fe region in the United States. and Wester is the most outspoken voice in the US Catholic Church for peace and nuclear abolition. So, Jack drafted a letter that I became part of, uh calling on Archbishop Wester to reach out to Pope Leo to urge him to call an emergency international summit minimally of Putin, Xi and Trump, the three main nuclear powers, because we’re, there's so much more risk of nuclear war now than there's really ever been before. Uh so when I was in Italy, I met with Cardinal Semeraro who's the in charge of the committee on sanctification. Uh he and I were at the same alternative university program that meets every summer in the Italian Alps called Tonal Estate. And so I spoke to Archbishop Semeraro, I mean Cardinal Semeraro, and he promised that he would handle the letter to Pope Leo. So at that point we had gone beyond the archbishop uh Wester initiative. So, I drafted a new appeal [this letter, dated on August 24th] directly to Pope Leo and I thought of it as working on two levels. One to urge cajole encourage the pope to call this kind of emergency summit. But secondly, to include enough information there about why the risk had grown so dangerous uh that we could also use it as an educational tool to mobilize the population pretty much around the world to say get off this insane path of warfare and potential nuclear warfare. So, I start the appeal by quoting Tulsi Gabbard, uh, who occasionally had some very lucid moments. And on June 10th, 2025, Tulsi released a two and a half minute video starting off with Hiroshima and says that what happened in Hiroshima was peanuts compared to the weapons we have today. Uh and then she said uh we're closer to nuclear annihilation today than we've ever been before and war- mongers in capitals around the world are proceeding in that direction. Then in October, Sergey Narishkin, the head of Russia's SVR, Foreign Intelligence Agency, said that uh where civilization today is more — at its most fragile moment since World War II, and the risk of of a new world war looms greatly. So, the fact that the two intelligence chiefs understood this, Tulsi's warning was issued two days before Israel and the United States began bombing uh Iran in 2025. She must have known that was coming, but she's been alert to this threat for a long time. Uh and then we've got this coming from other sources as well. We've got US military leaders talking about a war, the threat of war with China. Philip Davidson uh issued that warning in 2021. General Mike Minhan in 2023 said he thinks the US and China are going to be at war by 2025. Fortunately, that didn't happen. But then Admiral Buchanan said more recently that the the United States can fight and win a three-front nuclear war against Russia, China and North Korea and still keep enough nuclear weapons in reserve to maintain its global hegemony. Now that builds upon this discussion that's been going on in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists for example, which had written three articles discussing the fact that there are now two schools of nuclear planners. the old school who believes in deterrence theory and mutually assured destruction, but a new school of nuclear planners [called “Nuclear Primacy”] who believes that a nuclear war can be fought and won, which Reagan and Gorbachev have denied, which people have denied more recently. But they [this isnow Washington’s mainstream] say that now with advanced sonar technology, artificial intelligence, and other advanced intelligence, the US can actually pinpoint the location of every uh Chinese and Russian nuclear submarine, preemptively knock them out, knock out in a preemptive strike the intercontinental ballistic missiles, and shoot down uh the jet the fighter uh jets that would be dropping trying to drop nuclear weapons [on us] and the US could win this. There have been people reasoning like this for decades since the start of the nuclear age. Uh and in 2006, Lieber and Press had an article in Foreign Affairs, the Journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, in which they said that the US now has a first strike capability and we can wipe out China and Russia in a preemptive strike. And the people in Russia thought that that was official US policy [because] it was published the Council on Foreign Relations publication [AND also in Harvard’s journal International Security]. Washington Post reported that heads were exploding in the Kremlin because they thought this was official US policy. Now maybe it is official US policy. Uh but because there's so much more talk about the use of nuclear weapons, uh, I mean I can go on, but you can interrupt me if you'd like. But if not, I I'll keep explaining why we did this. Um, we know that there's pressure on Trump. I became a columnist for Al Jazera. The first piece that Eva Hughes and I wrote, we had written six pieces there for Al Jazzer. Eva teaches at Colombia and she's the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. She's terrific. So the first piece we wrote was titled “Breaking the Nuclear Taboo," and we reason why Trump, you know, who got this massive ego, and you know as you know is a pathological narcissist, he's being told by some people Netanyahu Steven Miller Pete Hegseth, maybe Marco Rubio, Sebastian Gorka, telling him you can go down as the greatest president in history. You've broken every custom, every norm, every tradition, US law, international law. The only taboo you haven't broken is the nuclear taboo. And every other president's been afraid to break that for 81 years. But you can do it. And we we know from, you know, as Marjorie Taylor Green of all people just warned, Trump is contemplating and being urged to use nuclear weapons tactical nuclear weapons in Iran which we can get into in a few minutes. Uh so but we also know not only is Trump under that kind of pressure, Putin is under that kind of pressure. We've seen Russian leaders [especially Karaganov] talking to Putin about the need to escalate dramatically. And when Putin met with a friend of mine a few months ago, he said that he's under enormous pressure from the hawks in Russia to act much more aggressively in Ukraine. Then we've got the recent comments by Elbridge Colby, the policy chief at the Pentagon, who just wrote last week that the United States needs if fighting breaks out in the Pacific, the US will need to resort to nuclear weapons. partly because uh the US has depleted its missiles, depleted its interceptors, depleted its precision precisiong guided munitions. Uh and I mean there is so much more of this kind of insane talk because the likelihood the Pentagon has been trying a war game of limited nuclear war for decades and they never can do it. it always ends up in a fullscale nuclear war. And we've known forever, but especially since the 1980s and the work done on uh nuclear winter, that even a limited nuclear war can trigger a partial nuclear winter. As Robock and Toone and others have studied more recently, a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan which 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons were deployed would in would burn the cities uh and create partial nuclear winter in which the sun's rays would be blocked from coming to the earth. We'd have famine, disease, and that limited nuclear war could cause up to two billion deaths. But we don't have a hundred nuclear weapons. We've got more than 12,000 nuclear weapons. And they're not Hiroshima size. Most are between seven and 70 times the size of the bomb that devastated Hiroshima. So this is a reality, and that as a species you know we need to really think of this along with global warming as a planetary existential threat. But we see Trump wanted to make America great again. Putin wanted to make Russia great again. Xi wanted to make China great again. Modi wanted to make India great again. Netanyahu wanted to make Israel great again. We see nationalists who speak for the planet was the question that we were posing. And we said that sometimes Lula speaks for the planet, and Lula has called for in this phone conversation with Trump a couple days ago, three days ago exactly, he called for a a special emergency session of the United Nations to get us off this path of war. He's previously called for that in meetings with Putin and Xiinping. So that's along the same lines of what we're calling for. We said that the that sometimes Guttieras, but it's mostly been Pope Leo 14th who has raised this clarion call for humanity and he's talking about the need to end wars, the need to for nuclear abolition, the need for a different course for mankind. So he's got a unique kind of moral authority right now. And so we're urging him through these appeals to speak out for humanity and call on uh the at least the leaders of the three major nations, but there should be more also for an emergency summit meeting to get us off this path of war and nuclear war. And the reason why I think it is realistic at this moment, is the United States is bogged down in Iran. You know, the Iranians have their foot on Trump's neck and they're not letting him up. And Trump has been desperately trying to either through economic pressure or military pressure uh to get out of this war as quickly as he can because the US has already been defeated by Iran. But the similar situation, not quite the same, but in some ways parallel with Russia in Ukraine where Russia's making some slow progress on the battlefield, but Ukraine has been hitting Russian oil refineries, Russian shipping, grain shipping, you know, and so what we're seeing right now is that warfare as a means of settling disputes, problems, crises is increased. increasingly irrelevant. The US, the most powerful country in the history of the world, has not really won a significant war since World War II. And even that's questionable because Germanyy's leading the rearmament of Europe and Japan is leading the rearmament of the Pacific. So what did we win in World War II? Uh but as since then the US was defeated in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, Libya; Quagmire Syria — where has the US had a military victory? maybe go 4-1 but didn't have a diplomatic victory and maybe Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada in 1983. But if the US can't win in Iran and Russia has been bogged down there for 5 years in uh in Ukraine, maybe we need to find different ways to settle these disputes. And so this is what we're asking the Pope to do. And we're we've been getting heads of state, former heads of state, former leaders of militaries, uh former diplomats from around the world signing on because I think there's a universal recognition that we're on a very dangerous path and the pressure on Putin is enormous and and Trump could in this moment of desperation actually resort to using nuclear weapons because nothing else is working in the war in Iran. So that's why I'm so worried. That's why I started this initiative of building on Jack Gilroy's brilliant stroke and why we're getting such a positive response because people recognize this around the world. (15:15)

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.