Press TV has interviewed Mike Billington, a member of the Executive Intelligence Review in Leesburg, to discuss the possible deployment of an American missile system to the Korean Peninsula after North Korea launched a long-range rocket despite warnings by a number of neighbors and world powers.
The following is a rough transcription of the interview.
Press TV: These entities from China to Russia, to the United States are all expressing their concern about North Korea’s rocket launch? Do they have reasons to be concerned or is it simply as the North Koreans have put it; successfully launching a satellite into orbit?
Billington: It certainly is successfully launching a satellite into orbit and I think that’s to be commended. They certainly have the right to the peaceful use of space. I should point out that many leading scientists, including Ted Postol from MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) who is a former top adviser to the US Navy, has issued articles making it clear that the missile technology being used here is not that of an ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile), it is a space entry of vehicle and that the building of an ICBM required very much more advance that has to be able to return into the atmosphere and so forth.
But I think that what you mentioned about the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missiles, I think goes to the real point which is that there has been enormous pressure on the Park Geun-hye government of South Korea to deploy these missiles, which is very clear to the Koreans as to China and Russia that these are not aimed at North Korea. You do not need high altitude missiles to defeat an attack coming 30 miles away.
We are dealing here with part of the very overt public, not even embarrassing to the Obama administration, preparation for nuclear war against Russia and China. The deployment of these missiles and their radar are aimed at China, aimed at Russia’s Far East, they are coming in conjunction with Ash Carter’s deployment tripling of the military forces in Europe, on the border of Russia including in the Baltic states, literally on their border which the Russians recognize as something parallel to what the Germans did when they prepared for the invasion in World War II.
And of course as you know the US is now in the process of deploying massive military forces into eight foreign military bases in the Philippines. So this is a ring around China, this is a preparation for implementation of Obama’s and the British insane prompt global strike policy, which is a first strike policy to take out China’s capacity to respond to a first strike attack by taking out supposedly believing they could take out their interfering capacity which they cannot. It is an insane policy which has brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Press TV: Why would the United States or the UK or these entities would they want to take the world basically towards nuclear war? What can they gain from this if they are threatening China?
Billington: That is exactly the right question and it can only be answered by recognizing that the entire Western financial system in Europe and United States is in free fall. Even the leading newspapers in the West, Handelsblatt this week announced that the Deutsche Bank is in free fall. Their stocks have collapsed by 80 percent. They are overburdened with quadrillion dollars worth of derivative debts which are worthless.
We are looking at a total breakdown of the Western banking system and in the view of London and the city and Wall Street, the emergence of the BRICS, the emergence of China’s role with Russia and India especially in building nations around the world is intolerable. They see this as the enemy and that is why you see this incredible attempt to paint Putin and Xi Jinping as somehow aggressors, as enemies when of course neither of these nations are involved in any kind of aggression certainly in comparison with the overt regime change war policies of the Obama administration, this killer in the White House to take pride in his mass slaughter of nations and people.
No, this is an attempt to provoke a war over the fact that the entire Western financial system is collapsing, that the power structure of Obama and his allies, his controllers, I should say, in London is falling apart and they are being driven to what they believe that the only way of preserving that power which is by proceeding with a war to stop the emergence of this new paradigm.
Mr. and Mrs. LaRouche have been very much involved in supporting this new Silk Road approach of Xi Jinping and the attempt to provoke a war with China is explicitly aimed at preventing that emergence of a new paradigm based on the common [names] of mankind, based on the idea that the human race is threatened now by this global war and has to be restored by giving people access to real development, to science, technology, infrastructure and that kind of development which in fact is what is being fostered by the new Silk Road process.