'We Have Entered a Time, Measured by the Clock of Thermonuclear Power' | EIRNS

EIR News by Dennis Small - Presidents Xi Junping and Vladimir Putin will meet at the upcoming SCO meeting. Credit: kremlin.ruj

“We must set ambitious goals and strive to take a qualitative leap in developing our economy and indeed, civilization as a whole,” the President told a large group of attentive young scientists and engineers. “First and foremost, this includes work in controlled thermonuclear fusion…. Equally fruitful collaboration is needed for another large-scale project: the creation of a space system with a special power plant and a so-called space tug based on a nuclear power unit. Such solutions open fundamentally new prospects for deep space exploration … while crucially expanding opportunities for creativity and self-realization among talented young people.”

The President in question was Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and he was speaking on Aug. 22 to young employees of the Russian nuclear industry during his visit to the Russian Federal Nuclear Center—National Research Institute of Experimental Physics. The occasion was the 80th anniversary of the founding of nuclear work in Russia. In his extended remarks, Putin also emphasized the importance of “creating and implementing cutting-edge technologies, as well as executing major infrastructure projects, including the Northern Sea Route, which will form part of the Trans-Arctic Transport Corridor—from St. Petersburg via Murmansk to Vladivostok.”

This concept of Man’s scientific future, and the role of youth in shaping the Earth’s next fifty years, will be at the center of the deliberations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, which will be held Aug. 31-Sept. 1 in Tianjin, China. The SCO meeting will bring together the leaders of Russia (Putin), China (Xi Jinping) and India (Narendra Modi), among others. The SCO’s 10 member states represent about 3.4 billion people (over 40% of the world’s population); six of those ten (Russia, India, China, Iran, Belarus and Kazakhstan) are also members of the BRICS—which is playing a leading role in pressing the Global Majority’s agenda of putting an end to 500 years of colonialism by organizing a new, just world economic order.

This same hopeful concept of the future will be the center of gravity of the bilateral summit between Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi Jinping on Sept. 2, the day after the SCO concludes; and it will carry over to the solemn Sept. 3 celebration in Beijing of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in the Pacific, at which President Putin will be the guest of honor. The Eastern Economic Forum will get underway that same day in Vladivostok, where political and business leaders from around the world will gather to explore joint infrastructure and other great projects, and the keynote address will be delivered by President Putin on Sept. 5.

The Schiller Institute has urged President Trump to bring the United States into these development projects, particularly the building of a tunnel under the Bering Strait connecting the U.S. with Russia, which is also the key to building a durable peace in Ukraine and around the world. The quickest, most audacious way to do that would be for President Trump to join Putin, Xi and other world leaders at the Sept. 3 celebration in Beijing of the end of World War II.

But there are other, complementary pathways to that same end result, which involve Lyndon LaRouche—and his reemerging international youth movement. Back in April 2007, an extraordinary paper by Lyndon LaRouche was presented at a Moscow conference on “A Transcontinental Eurasia-America Transport Link via the Bering Strait.” LaRouche charged his audience: “We have thus entered a time, measured by the clock of nuclear fission and thermonuclear power’s development, when … the science-driven, capital-intensive mode of development of the basic economic infrastructure and standard of living of the populations, will dominate any successful form of civilized development of relations among the sovereign nations of the planet.… The bridging of the Bering Strait becomes, thus, now, the navel of a new birth of a new world economy.”

LaRouche prefaced that vision of the future by warning of the imminent, breakdown collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial order.

“This onrushing collapse of the world’s presently hyper-inflated, disintegrating world monetary-financial system, requires early concerted emergency action by responsible leading nations. A sudden change in U.S. political trends, back to the traditions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, is urgently needed for this purpose. Such a change in U.S. policy must be realized through emergency cooperation which would be led by a concert of leading world powers. These must include the U.S.A., Russia, China, and India, as the rallying-point for a new, spreading partnership among perfectly sovereign nation-state economies.”

LaRouche specified: “Such a plan was already crafted, during 1990-1992, under the direction of my wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who remains the principal political and cultural leader among my associates in Europe and beyond. This perspective must now be revived to become a global actuality.”

Wise words. Wise as well, those who today muster the political forces to follow them.