On Wednesday, June 12, the Schiller Institute hosted an emergency press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. to bring the imminent danger of nuclear war to an American audience. The event featured four distinguished speakers: Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector and U.S. Marine intelligence office; Col. (ret.) Richard H. Black, former head of the U.S. Army’s Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon and a former Virginia State Senator; Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute; and Col. (ret.) Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The in-person gathering at the National Press Club was joined by dozens of journalists participating by Zoom from around the world, with simultaneous interpretation provided in Spanish, German and French. In addition, close to 2,000 people participated on a live Schiller Institute feed, with others joining via other electronic venues. Within 24 hours, over 30,000 had viewed the event.
The press conference took place in an exceptionally timely way, as tensions between the United States and Russia have skyrocketed over the recent weeks, prompting some in Russia to discuss the potential of changing their nuclear doctrine, which currently rules out a first strike, and referring to this as a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis. Worse, there is no semblance of maturity or comprehension of this danger within American or NATO officialdom, nor in the general public, only a seemingly mindless ladder of escalation of further involvement in Ukraine.
The panelists were excellently suited to discuss this topic, as, among others, Scott Ritter and Helga Zepp-LaRouche have been listed as targets by Ukraine’s U.S.-funded Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) for their role in speaking out publicly against NATO’s pro-war policies. Additionally, Ritter was recently prevented from boarding a plane to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia, based on orders from the State Department, and even had his passport seized. When asked by one participant in the press conference why the U.S. didn’t want Ritter to travel abroad, he replied that this was going to be part of a 40-day peace mission to bring the message of friendship from America to Russia, and that this “scared them to death.”
In his concluding remarks, Ritter emphasized: “Every American needs to wake up every morning with that fear [of nuclear war] in your stomach… I don’t know what you think anybody’s been saying up here, but what I heard is we’re headed towards a nuclear conflict that the United States is going to start. How do we stop it? The first thing is the realization that this threat is real.”
Zepp-LaRouche elaborated on the needed solution: “We are going into the most important and dangerous period probably in all of history.” The World War II generation knew what war was, she stated, but the new generation is shallow-minded, and doesn’t know history. All nations must come together to organize a new international security and development architecture, in much the same way that the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia put an end to the Thirty Years war in Europe. For that, there must be a sense of higher lawfulness, natural law, Zepp-LaRouche concluded, and referenced her “Ten Principles For a New Security and Development Architecture.” “We have to lift humanity to a higher level of morality if we want to survive this great danger.”
The full video of the emergency press conference is available here.
