What is it going to take to wake people up? Russia is deploying tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, and there is lots of talk in the Russian media about using such weapons to bring a quick end to the war in Ukraine. The theory is that once the Russians show that they are willing to use tactical nukes, the U.S. and the other western powers will back off.
But that won’t be what happens. Instead of backing off, the Biden administration will respond by using U.S. tactical nuclear weapons against Russian targets in Ukraine. And once both sides have used tactical nukes, it is just a matter of time before the big nukes get used.
This war could have been avoided at the negotiating table long before it ever started, but that didn’t happen.
And we could still have a negotiated solution, but at this point both sides are not interested in peace talks at all.
So we will continue to steamroll down a road that leads to nuclear conflict. Both sides just continue to escalate matters over and over again, and even Vladimir Putin is admitting that this could easily cause “a Third World War”…
Putin, speaking at a meeting with Russian war correspondents in Moscow yesterday, said: ‘The United States pretends not to be afraid of an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, but sane people there clearly do not want to take this to a Third World War.
‘In the event of a Third World War, there will be no winners, including America.’
But even though Putin realizes where things could be heading, he insists that peace talks are not an option.
In fact, he just said that this war will only end by “freeing the entire territory of the former Ukraine from the United States and Ukrainian Nazis”…
“We were forced to try to end the war that the West started in 2014 by force of arms. And Russia will end this war by force of arms, freeing the entire territory of the former Ukraine from the United States and Ukrainian Nazis. There are no other options,” Putin said.
“The Ukrainian army of the US and NATO will be defeated, no matter what new types of weapons it receives from the West. The more weapons there are, the fewer Ukrainians and what used to be Ukraine will remain.”
And importantly, he emphasized that “Direct intervention by NATO’s European armies will not change the outcome. But in this case, the fire of war will engulf the whole of Europe. It looks like the US is ready for that too.”
Did you catch that last part?
Even if NATO forces directly intervene in Ukraine, Putin says that “will not change the outcome”.
He is not going to back down, and he is not bluffing.
Of course Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is also completely ruling out peace talks…
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected the prospect of negotiations with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
In an interview with Britain’s Sky News, which was broadcast on Thursday, Zelensky said that Putin “doesn’t want negotiations because he doesn’t want peace.”
The Ukrainian leader said he was “convinced” that Ukraine was “just the first step” for Putin, who has his eye on “other countries.”
U.S. leaders have been making similar statements.
They keep telling us that “we are in it to win it”, whatever that means.
Our politicians have become absolutely obsessed with “winning” in Ukraine, and they are not going to back down either.
But many inside Russia believe that western leaders are weak and that they can be forced to back down.
As I noted at the beginning of this article, the idea that using tactical nukes will force the U.S. and other western powers to back off is starting to gain a lot of traction in the Russian media. For example, the following excerpt comes from an article in the Russian media entitled “By using its nuclear weapons, Russia could save humanity from a global catastrophe” that was authored by Professor Sergey Karaganov, the honorary chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy…
We cannot repeat the ‘Ukrainian scenario’. For a quarter of a century we were not listened to when we warned that NATO enlargement would lead to war; we tried to delay, to “negotiate”. As a result, we ended up in a serious armed conflict. Now the price of indecision is an order of magnitude higher than it would have been earlier.
But what if the present Western leaders refuse to back down? Perhaps they have lost all sense of self-preservation? Then we will have to hit a group of targets in a number of countries to bring those who have lost their senses back to their senses.
It’s a morally frightening choice – we would be using God’s weapon and condemning ourselves to great spiritual loss. But if this is not done, not only may Russia perish, but most likely the whole of human civilization will end.
The paragraphs above were not written by some random nutjob.
Professor Sergey Karaganov is considered to be one of Russia’s top foreign policy experts. But he is dead wrong.
If Russia uses tactical nukes in Ukraine, western leaders will not lose their resolve. Instead, they will use tactical nukes in return.
We must not go down this road. Unfortunately, people like you and I don’t get to make these decisions.
The Russians just deployed tactical nukes to Belarus, and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is warning some of these weapons are “three times more powerful than US atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945”…
His comments come as Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko revealed that his country had started to receive tactical nuclear weapons from its ally Russia.
Lukashenko told Russian state TV that his country was receiving weapons – some of which he said were three times more powerful than US atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus is Moscow’s first move of such warheads – shorter-range less powerful nuclear weapons that could potentially be used on the battlefield – outside Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
When people hear the term “tactical nukes”, they tend to think of them as relatively small weapons. But that is not the case at all.
In fact, if one of those tactical nukes is launched it will be the largest nuclear weapon used in a war in all of recorded human history.
I just wish that both sides would stop escalating the conflict, because once nukes are used there will be no turning back. Sadly, our leaders just can’t help themselves.
Just a few days ago, we learned that the Biden administration is actually planning to send depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine…
The Biden administration is set to transfer depleted uranium shells to Ukraine for the first time since the Russian invasion began The Wall Street Journal reports Tuesday.
Internal administration debate over the controversial munitions has been ongoing for several months, but an admin official quoted in WSJ says at this point there are “no major obstacles” to sending it, which will be used to equip M1 Abrams tanks provided by Washington.
This is a crime against humanity all by itself.
If you doubt this, go to Google Images and type in “depleted uranium Iraq” and look at the pictures that come up.
On top of everything else, a former Secretary-General of NATO is warning that some European nations such as Poland are actually considering sending troops into Ukraine if the alliance as a whole doesn’t take stronger action soon…
The former civilian head of the NATO alliance is warning that some Eastern European states are prepared to send their soldiers to Ukraine if the bloc does not make significant pledges to Kiev during an upcoming summit.
Anders Rasmussen, former NATO Secretary-General and current adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is touring Europe and Washington to gauge the level of support Kiev should expect at the Vilnius Summit in July. “I think the Poles would seriously consider going in and assemble a coalition of the willing if Ukraine doesn’t get anything in Vilnius,” he said. “We shouldn’t underestimate the Polish feelings, the Poles feel that for too long western Europe did not listen to their warnings against the true Russian mentality.”
How does this end?
It has become clear that neither side is going to back down. And if push comes to shove, the Russians will definitely use nukes.
I have been warning about this type of a scenario for a long time, but I feel like my warnings fall mostly on deaf ears.
This is not a game.
If the small nukes get used, the big nukes will get used.
And if the big nukes get used, millions of you are going to die.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
If it is inevitable that nukes are going to be used then it is incumbent that the U.S. use them first and with an overwhelming number. However, Joe with his thumb in his bum who doesn’t even know what day of the week it is will be standing there while someone else changes his diaper.