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Wednesday, October 7th, 2026, 11am ET/ 5pm CET
The turmoil of the emergence of a new era in world history is upon us, as in the turbulent years of the 1980s. These are not “normal times.” This time is reminiscent of the months just before the sudden fall of the Berlin Wall, November 9, 1989, followed by the “unthinkable” dissolution of the Soviet Union two years later. Now, as then, most analysts fail to grasp the depth of what is actually going on. Their axiomatic beliefs prevent it.
There is something that unifies the popular uprisings in Spain (“housing”), France (“education”), Germany (“government collapse”), and Italy (farmers, fishermen and truckers actions.) The triggers may seem different, but the underlying process is the same. One thing is clear—all NATO economies are failing, and no NATO nation’s people support the drive for a new world war!! The trans-Atlantic’s leaders, for the most part, “have been tested in the balance and found wanting.” The multiple flashpoints of war, the electoral campaigns of the next 30 days in Brazil, Israel and the United States, should be viewed, not as “important current events,” but as embedded in something much bigger. The assembly of 800,000 people in France for Pope Leo’s Sunday Mass, half or more of whom had not ever been to such a gathering in their lives before, were seeking what they hoped would be the presence of authentic leadership, in the person of Pope Leo XIV. His recent campaign for a “Just Peace” doctrine in the Church, supplanting the opportunistic practice of citing—but not studying—St. Augustine on “just war,” and his adamant rejection of nuclear weapons, can supply a moral compass in a time of crisis.
In a discussion yesterday, EIR intelligence officer Roger Moore reminded the assembled that forty years ago, October 11-12, the Reykjavik, Iceland Summit between American President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev was held. Internet narratives that refer to Reykjavik state that it was Ronald Reagan’s refusal to abandon his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) that was the “deal-breaker” for negotiations there, that could have eliminated the use of most, if not all nuclear weapons. That “narrative” is wrong. In reality, it was that very SDI proposal, involving creating joint technological breakthroughs for an advanced laser weapons defense system, that was designed to render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete,” and therefore unnecessary. Gorbachev’s rejection of Reagan’s SDI proposal ended the chance for the Soviet Union to escape its own demise, accelerated by the “primitive accumulation” methods its economy was forced into to attempt to keep pace with the United States and NATO in the 1980s arms race.
The truth is that the founder of this magazine, EIR Editor-In-Chief Lyndon LaRouche, had, with the knowledge of the Reagan Administration’s National Security Council, formulated the SDI policy. LaRouche engaged in a series of negotiations with representatives of the Soviet government from December of 1981 through early 1983. Ronald Reagan famously announced the SDI policy in a speech on March 23, 1983, to the shock of governments worldwide, and many officials in the United States.
Five days before Reykjavik, as Lyndon LaRouche reported in his “The Night They Came To Kill Me”: “On October 6, 1986, a virtual army of more than four hundred armed personnel descended upon the town of Leesburg, Virginia, for a raid on the offices of EIR and its associates, and also deployed for another, darker mission. The premises at which I was residing at that time were surrounded by an armed force, while aircraft, armored vehicles, and other personnel waited for the order to move in shooting. Fortunately, the killing did not happen, because someone with higher authority than the Justice Department Criminal Division head William Weld, ordered the attack on me called off. The forces readied to move in on me, my wife, and a number of my associates, were pulled back in the morning….. This is not only my cause for complaint. The great majority of Americans are as much the intended victim as I am. They have a right to know what is being done to them in this connection. I explain….. Ironically, but not accidentally, this operation was unleashed at the time President Reagan was meeting Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, where the President, once again, firmly restated his commitment to SDI.”
LaRouche’s proposal was the moral opposite of multiple preceding “deep state” lunatic proposals for nuclear war, starting with Winston Churchill’s May, 1945 “Operation Unthinkable,” which sought to nuke the Soviet Union by no later than September, 1945. In 1949, Operation Dropshot, formulated by the United States Department of Defense, proposed dropping 300 nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union to destroy 85% of its industrial capacity, with “collateral damage” of tens of millions of deaths. There were more proposals, all hidden from the American people.
In 1954, the US’s “Operation Vulture” proposed using 3 “small tactical” atomic bombs to save the defeated French forces at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam. In 1958, according to the late Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, the United States had a plan to bomb mainland China with nuclear weapons in order to prevent an invasion of Taiwan. (In a 2021 interview with CBS News reporter Michelle Miller, Ellsberg said, “I was part of a plan that should never have been made, that was a crime against humanity.”) And on July 20, 1961, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, Gen. Curtis LeMay and others presented a plan to JFK to launch a surprise nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, by no later than December of 1963.
The following year saw the October, 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and the courageous actions by the Kennedy brothers to open up back-channel negotiations with the Soviet Union. Like those JFK/RFK discussions with Khrushchev, the LaRouche discussions were carried out under duress, and on the brink of war. For example, the near-nuclear war of 1983, thwarted by the courageous intervention of one man, Stanislav Petrov, was discussed just last week in Valdai by Vladimir Putin. In that case, intelligence, not artificial intelligence, prevailed. The LaRouche-Reagan initiative known as the SDI, far from preventing negotiations in Reykjavik, was the basis for a new security and development architecture at that time, presented in LaRouche’s 1984 Presidential campaign “Draft Memorandum of Understanding Between the United States and the USSR.”
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who was with Lyndon LaRouche when they came to kill him, has proposed Ten Principles for a New Security and Development Architecture, in a time when “the tables have turned.” Today, the idea of “a Just Peace” must pervade discussions in the churches, unions, and other institutions of the United States and Europe. Those in motion and turmoil must begin to think in the spirit of Pope Leo’s and Zepp-LaRouche’s Nicholas of Cusa, whom the Pope discussed in his Angelus speech last October 25.
The world needs a “coincidence of opposites” approach to world peace. China and Russia can help a declining trans-Atlantic world, but only if the United States Presidential system can become capable of responding. The American Presidency is an institution, not merely an individual. LaRouche Independent Presidential candidate Diane Sare will shortly release a statement that will denounce the crazed Pete Hegseth’s Autonomous Warfare Command, as well as propose a sane approach to a just peace with Iran, China, Russia and all nations. The lesson of that October 6, 40 years ago, is that a great idea, and a great movement for great ideas advanced on behalf of humanity, can never be defeated, if you keep fighting.
